Uniting Human Intelligence and AI to Unlock Value

I spent three days immersed in the Databricks Data & AI Summit expecting to be captivated by the amazing advancement of data and AI technologies. That certainly happened, but what I left with was renewed focus in the value of human intelligence and the realization of just how important it is to understand how it flows through a business.

During the keynote, Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi interviewed his counterpart at Nvidia, Jensen Huang. Huang spoke about the foundational importance of intelligence for every business, saying, “Every company of course, at its foundation, is about domain-specific intelligence.

“At the end of the day, every one of us will become intelligence manufacturers.”

AI should free up humans to do smarter and more complex things

One of my favorite books is “The Future of the Mind” by Michio Kaku. The book illuminated that “the human brain, with its 100 billion neurons, consumes about 20 watts of power, which is about as much as a dim light bulb. If you could power a computer with that kind of efficiency, it would need a nuclear power plant to run. Yet our brain does it with the energy of a cheeseburger.”

To that end, replacing the miracle of the human mind is a fool’s errand. We have the opportunity to make better use of human intelligence. This is the value of AI. To unlock that value, we must turn our focus toward understanding the human intelligence that’s in our business.

Data vs. Intelligence

This consideration of “data” vs. “intelligence” isn’t new. Business Intelligence has been a popular term for over a decade, and most businesses equate BI with turning data into insights. But BI doesn’t address the very important dimension of intelligence within a business—the intelligence and capabilities of the human behind it.

To understand how to reap the benefits of AI in big enterprises, you have to understand how human intelligence flows. This is a new concept for most people, but fortunately, it’s not entirely different from how we’ve understood workflows, process flows, and data flows in business prior.

Data Is Still Important, Right?

Realizing the benefits of AI is a data-intensive process, especially in the context of Gen AI. Many of the AI conversations I’ve had with clients and peers quickly turn data-centric. It’s not surprising given many individual companies’ focus is to first work their way up the enterprise data maturity curve so they can start exploring their own AI use cases.

Step one is getting your data estate to the point where it can support AI capabilities. This is an unavoidable first step. Once you’re there, those newly acquired AI capabilities still won’t lead to value until you know where to focus them. You need to understand where human intelligence drives your business to see where to focus those AI capabilities.

Understanding Human Intelligence

This isn’t an academic journal, so I promise not to dive into a deep rabbit hole about the definition of “human intelligence.” It’s simply what people know and their ability to apply that knowledge to something. In this case, people apply what they know to a business.

With Insight Global’s staffing business, our people know how to find and engage great candidates. Sure, our business intelligence tells us how many candidate interactions we have and how effective we are at helping the right people find the right jobs. That business intelligence is useful for making important business decisions. We invest our time and resources based on the insight gained from those BI capabilities.

But our secret sauce—what allows us to do what we do well day-in and day-out—is human intelligence-driven work. Candidate interactions, bringing the right candidates to our clients, engaging our deployed consultants, and all the complex tasks powered by our people in between. Our CDIO, DeWayne Griffin, shared a bit about implementation of well-targeted AI use cases that have driven our business forward in this blog post. By observing our own intelligence flows, we’ve found incredibly valuable AI use cases and inserted our AI capabilities in the right spots.

So, why bother making this distinction from business intelligence? Why focus on human intelligence? We do this to get value from AI investments. Those investments need to have meaningful impact on valuable business processes. You know which processes deliver value to your business. All that’s left is understanding how intelligence flows through your organization. It’s in understanding how intelligence results in value. Then you can maximize that value with a combination of human intelligence and AI—together.

Putting This Concept to Good Use

Think about the times when your people use their human intelligence to:

• Make decisions as part of standard processes (e.g. approving contract terms, reviewing a work product).
• Create assets by generating work product (e.g. drafting a process document, annotating code).
• Manage resources by calling the right people to action and prioritize the right things to work on.

All of these actions bring value to the business. Some do so more than others, and they all require differing levels of intelligence. The better we get at mapping these activities and understanding how human intelligence-driven activities flow into each other in our business, the easier it is to identify the right AI use cases.

The goal is to use AI to augment the human intelligence in your organization or even free those people up to use their much more powerful intelligence for the most complex and valuable intelligence tasks. This won’t just make for more profits, it will make for happier, more fulfilled humans, too.

To learn more about our AI services and capabilities, contact us below!