The rapid rise of generative AI over the past few years has raised a concern among employees: Will companies simply replace human employees with AI tools? The revolution isn't here yet. While companies are starting to consider using AI to perform tasks typically performed by humans, most companies are still stopping short of explicitly replacing humans with machines. However, some organizations are eagerly embracing the future of AI and hiring AI bots as official employees.
Lattice is “hiring” AI bots
The company in question, Lattice, made the announcement on Tuesday, calling these bots both “digital workers” and “AI employees.” The company's CEO, Sarah Franklin, believes the AI workplace revolution is coming and companies like Lattice need to adapt. For Lattice, that means treating the AI tools you integrate into the workplace like human employees. That vision includes onboarding the bots, setting goals for the AI, and providing feedback to the tools. Lattice will provide these “digital workers” with employee records, add them to its HR management system, and give them the same training that a typical employee would receive. The “AI employees” will also have managers, which will likely be human (for now).
Franklin also shared the news on LinkedIn, and the post spread across social media sites from Reddit to X. In the post, Franklin acknowledged that “this process raises a lot of questions and we don't have all the answers yet,” but said he is trying to find answers by “innovating” and “changing people's minds.” (The post has 314 comments, but comments are currently disabled.) In another post on Lattice's site, Franklin shared some potential questions, including: “What does it mean to hire a digital worker? How will they be onboarded? How will they be evaluated? What does this mean for my job? What does it mean for our children's future jobs? Do they share our values or are they an AI anthropomorphism?”
In this blog post, you can see how Lattice envisions AI employees in their workplace suite. In one screenshot, an organizational chart shows “Piper AI,” a sales development representative, as part of a team of three “people” reporting to a manager. Lattice asks Piper AI to provide her with her legal name (Piper AI), preferred full name (Piper AI), and work email ([email protected]), and her profile reads, “I'm Piper, an AI tool used to generate leads, take notes, draft emails, and schedule your next call.” (So where did “Esther” come from?)
This isn't the company's first foray into AI — Lattice provides companies with AI-powered HR software — and to Franklin, and to Lattice as a whole, the announcement seems to fit into the AI plans the company has developed. But to an outsider, it seems downright strange.
“AI Employees” are fake
Without knowing the full context, this all seems very odd to me. It's one thing to integrate an AI bot into your platform, as many companies have done and will continue to do. So Piper AI makes sense as a waiting assistant in your work room. If you want to use it to schedule meetings and draft emails, fine. If not, ignore it. Instead, Lattice wants to “hire” an AI bot and treat it just like you, albeit without a salary or benefits. Will Piper AI also get unlimited PTO, or will it be forced to work 24/7?
To me, “digital workers” and “AI employees” are buzzwords, and “onboarding” employee resources with AI tools is a cosmetic thing. Lattice can say it's “really” employing AI, and key people who are interested in cutting-edge technology but don't fully understand how it works will be impressed. But “AI” isn't actually intelligent. There are no “workers” you can hire. Generative AI is based on a model, and responds to prompts based on the training set of that model. In the case of text-based large language modes, it's not actually “thinking,” it's predicting what word should come next based on millions, billions, or trillions of words it has seen before.
If your tool is designed to take notes during a meeting, you're going to take notes, whether you assign a manager to do it or keep it as a floating window in your management system. Of course, if you know what to do, you can train your bot to respond in a way that's more convenient for your organization and workflow, but to do that, on board Distribute the bot to your staff.
In fact, giving “AI employees” too much credit can backfire when the bot inevitably returns incorrect information in your queries: AI has a tendency to hallucinate, meaning the bot will make something up and claim it's true. Huge Despite vast amounts of training data, companies have been unable to solve this problem and are now sticking warnings on their bots to let them know, ‘Don’t believe everything this bot says.’ Of course, humans will always make mistakes, but some people may be inclined to believe what their AI colleagues say, especially if they’re promoting the technology as the ‘next big thing.’
I can't imagine how an employee (human) would feel if their boss told them that they had to start managing a fake chatbot just like any other new employee (“Mike, you're going to be managing Piper AI from now on. Hold weekly meetings, give feedback, and monitor the growth of this non-existent AI bot.”). you We have a digital workforce, so there's no need to worry.”
I've reached out to Lattice to ask about this new policy and will update this post if I hear back.
