After three days, CEO Sarah Franklin suspended her company’s plans due to such strong resistance
People aren’t prepared for “digital workers” just yet, it seems evident.
Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice, an HR and performance management platform that offers over 5,000 organisations globally performance coaching, talent reviews, automation for onboarding, compensation management, and other HR tools, has learnt this lesson.
A digital employee: what is it? As per Franklin, they are Avatars, such as Devin the Engineer, Harvey the Attorney, Einstein the Service Agent, and Piper the Sales Agent, who have “entered the workforce and become our colleagues.” But these are AI-powered bots, not actual workers. These bots have replaced humans in task-performers, including the massive customer relationship management company Salesforce and startups like Cognition.ai and Qualified.
For example, Salesforce’s Einstein helps marketing and sales personnel by completing activities, forecasting income, and communicating with potential customers. Devin, the software engineer at Cognition, organises and carries out intricate engineering tasks. Over time, it learns to correct its own errors by retaining pertinent context and making thousands of decisions. Piper, a sales representative for Qualified, is characterised as “bright, hard-working, and consistently exceeds her targets.” She “works around the clock to convert inbound website traffic into pipeline.” I’m not aware of any requirements for health insurance, paid time off, or retirement plans among these agents.
Franklin saw a chance and chose to take advantage of it. The corporation declared on July 9 that it will treat digital workers like any other employee and begin providing support as part of its platform.
Franklin said, “Lattice is making AI history today.” “We’ll be the first to provide official Lattice personnel records to digital workers. Just like any other employee, digital workers will be safely onboarded, trained, and given objectives, performance metrics, suitable system access, and even a manager.
Particularly on LinkedIn, a platform not usually associated with the kind of intensive interaction observed on X (previously Twitter), the backlash was quick and, in many cases, nasty.
Executive Sawyer Middeleer of a company using AI for sales research posted on LinkedIn, saying, “As someone building an AI company, I say that this strategy and messaging completely miss the mark.” “It is disrespectful to your actual employees’ humanity to treat AI agents like employees.” Even worse, it implies that you view people as nothing more than “resources” to be compared and optimised against machines. That is totally at odds with an environment at work where people are supposed to be elevated.
Even more direct was self-employed marketing executive Scott Burgess.
“Amazing,” he shared. “I think AI is going to ruin everything more and more as it is used.” In addition to the difficulties they already face, workers now have to contend with “AI workers.” Is it possible for us to return it in its box?
Three days after making her statement, Franklin was forced to halt her company’s plans due to the criticism, which even garnered the post the dubious distinction of being listed in the “LinkedIn Lunatics” community.
These are legitimate worries, no doubt about it. Was Franklin mistaken, though? “Digital employees” are a given, right?
Unquestionably, AI is currently overhyped. We’ve witnessed Microsoft’s Copilot AI perform terribly and Google produce embarrassingly bad AI outcomes. All the hype and projections notwithstanding, AI is still in its infancy. Even the aforementioned AI-powered “digital assistants” are limited to simple tasks, and most executives accurately see AI in its infancy as being as unpredictable as a toddler, based on what I hear from customers and read in polls.
Like Google, Microsoft, and other major tech companies, Franklin erred by overhyping something that isn’t quite ready for prime time in order to obtain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Although her vision is admirable, she acted on it too quickly, just like many others. We are still learning about AI, and its ramifications are still mostly unknown. In the near future, there will definitely be “digital employees” that perform better than the majority of human workers, but we’re not sure when that will happen. It is obviously not taking place at this time.
