AI Isn’t a Technology Problem, It’s a Culture Problem—Dr. Clark Cully, Technology Division Chair, Indiana Wesleyan University

One of the things you mentioned earlier is responsible AI use or kind of this ethical component to AI use.

I mean, are there ethical ramifications we ought to be considering? I know I've seen this come up.

I'm not super active on social media, but I see sometimes folks saying, hey, do we have to disclose that AI wrote this post or created this image or graphics and so on? So I'd love to just kind of jump in a little bit there.

In many ways, some of the norms are still being developed.

So this is kind of an emerging frontier capability and different organizations are running with different levels of risk tolerance and perhaps aggressiveness in the integration of these tools.

And even in the regulatory environment in terms of like intellectual property, the courts are still kind of hashing through some of these implications.

So there aren't easy answers.

One of the things I would say from an ethical perspective, is doing AI well often feels right when you're on the receiving end, and doing AI poorly kind of feels manipulative or transactional when you're on the receiving end.

And so I think it's really important to consider the human and customer perspective or the employee perspective when you're deploying these tools, because it's not a yes, no.

I mean, one of the other ways people kind of get distracted is by it's good or it's bad, this kind of polarizing, bifurcated, black-white response to every new thing.

The how matters deeply.

And so if you're going to use, say, AI automations for customer service, There's one way where you just say, I'm going to automate the whole thing because it's easy and saves money.

I'm going to assume that AI can do most of what a person can do and that the difference is marginal.

And then I'm going to push that out at large scale and see how it goes.

And you're kind of experimenting with your customers and seeing if their limitations, the times that the AI doesn't, get the right answer or can't really help with a complex problem.

You know, how does that feel to be on the receiving end? And one of the things that AI makes possible is a lot of choices or optionality that provide curated and customized experiences.

But instead, if you use AI as a giant funnel and you push everything into this big funnel and you make it the one size fits all solution, it actually makes things feel worse.

So an example might be that If you give individuals the choice of whether they would prefer to start with a human or start with an automation, we see often cases generational differences in what people's preferences are.

Using AI to add a new choice rather than remove choice or remove optionality, it can feel freeing and liberating.

And similarly, when you deploy capabilities as tools to help employees be more productive, are you doing it in a way that creates new choices or are you creating new constraints? And I think kind of leaning into choice and empowerment and flexibility and trust is a better approach.

And it both shows your regard for the person, but also your willingness to let them use their expertise and creativity to figure out what right looks like.

And so I really think it's important that we trust people to have the courage to try new things and to be able to make appropriate mistakes that occur during learning.

We do it in ways that take the feedback from what's working well and then adapt and scale it.

I think this crawl, walk, run approach or innovate before we scale is better than just saying, hey, I'm going to push the big magic.

I believe that automation can solve all the problems button.