It’s anticipated that as artificial intelligence technologies mature, they will unlock over $17.7 trillion in economic value each year by boosting performance and productivity across the global workforce. With 40,000 AI professionals in our workforce—second only to Silicon Valley—New York is positioned to capture an outsized share of those gains.
But there’s a catch: while New York is ahead of the curve when it comes to regulating AI, we still aren’t doing enough to make sure that the benefits of AI tools and technologies are felt by everyone in the workforce.
The problem is that AI is often seen chiefly as a way of augmenting the performance of office-bound knowledge workers — not of supporting the 80% of employees who don’t do their jobs sitting at a desk. Take Walmart, for instance: despite the company having provided 740,000 smartphones to associates in a bid to digitize in-store operations, the company’s recently unveiled generative AI toolkit was designed specifically to help non-store employees.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with using AI to support office workers. It’s been shown that generative AI tools, for instance, can improve the performance of such workers by as much as 40%. But we shouldn’t only be using AI tools to support desk-based employees — because if we do, we’ll miss out on some of the most compelling potential productivity and performance gains these technologies are capable of delivering.
Mobile workers are knowledge workers
The lack of attention to the frontline applications of AI shouldn’t come as a surprise: the world’s deskless workers — all 2.7 billion of them — have long been neglected by tech innovators. The vast majority of tech venture funding goes to companies that support white-collar workers. Meanwhile, just 10% of deskless workers believe they have access to the tools and technologies they need to do their jobs effectively, and less than half say they’re given meaningful opportunities to learn new skills at work.
Our tendency to treat deskless employees as second-class citizens is anchored in an outdated view of frontline teams as focused on transactional tasks and manual labor, rather than real knowledge work. The reality, though, is that in today’s connected workplace, frontline teams drive incredible value for their organizations by serving as expert sources of market intelligence, custodians of brand identity and customer relationships, and powerful drivers of business process innovation.
Given this, smart leaders increasingly view their frontline teams not as mere labor, but as mobile knowledge workers. Empowering these vital employees — and finding ways to use AI to augment their activities — is a vital step as businesses of all kinds look to beat burnout, boost retention, and empower frontline teams to drive productivity and performance across the value chain, improve the customer experience, and increase revenue.
The power of frontline AI
So what can AI, specifically, deliver for today’s frontline teams? The answers are as varied as the roles and responsibilities that frontline workers take on. There’s one key insight to remember, though: while frontline employees are every bit as smart, creative, engaged, and driven as their deskbound counterparts, they’re seldom given the tools and resources to truly unlock their full potential.
This isn’t just a question of underfunding or neglect — it’s also because, by their nature, frontline teams work in fast-changing and challenging mobile environments, and lack access to many of the tools used by deskbound knowledge workers. Unlike office workers, frontline teams need to be able to access the support and resources they need while on the floor, using whatever devices they have to hand, without disrupting high-stakes workflows.
That’s where AI can play an enormously beneficial role. Where an office worker can take the time to scroll through a website or click through a PDF to find the information they need, for instance, a frontline worker could use GenAI — perhaps via a hands-free voice-operated interface — to rapidly surface the exact information they need in a particular moment.
In other cases, AI tools can proactively recommend the tools and resources that a frontline employee needs — from bite-sized educational resources tailored to their role and learning style, to context-specific summaries explaining how to comply with a new mandate from head office, to auto-generated updates and targeted tips about new promotions or products. They can also provide AI-assisted task management, with scenario-specific tips on what steps to take or best practices to follow — and by tracking real-world employee actions, AI tools can also identify which approaches work well, and what steps employees should take to be more productive and successful.
It’s even possible to use AI to automatically moderate chatrooms and peer-to-peer communications, creating a safer and more inclusive way for frontline teams to stay in touch — or to proactively connect employees with real-time support for HR or work-related issues, as well as the wellness and mental health resources they need based on the specific stresses and pressures they’re facing.
By customizing, targeting, and streamlining the flow of information to individual teams, and helping to proactively surface emerging and established best practices across the entire workforce, AI tools can drive powerful benefits for deskless teams — more fully establish frontline employees as engaged, equal, and empowered members of the workforce. In this way, AI can become a workplace equalizer, giving all workers access to a wealth of knowledge, resources, and support they need to thrive.
Brace for impact
The irony is that while many investors, developers, and IT leaders think of AI as primarily a desktop resource, the tech industry is currently pushing toward a mobile-first vision for AI. Tech companies are developing more powerful and energy-efficient AI chips that enable inference tasks to be run on handheld devices. New augmented reality technologies — from the Rabbit puck to the Frame glasses to Humane pin to the Vision Pro goggles — are also driving AI out into the real world, with potentially transformative consequences for frontline teams.
Given the slower pace of innovation and tech adoption in the frontline space, it might take time for some of these impacts to be felt across the frontline workforce. But that creates an important opportunity for businesses to differentiate themselves with both employees and consumers. Companies that start working now to build an AI-ready frontline workforce, using today’s best technologies, will be better placed to benefit as these technologies evolve into even more powerful and ubiquitous frontline solutions in years to come.
The bottom line: if New York wants to remain a leader in the new AI economy, then we need to ensure that organizations of all kinds — from retailers to construction companies, and from logistics firms to healthcare organizations —move quickly to position themselves for a world in which AI is a vital part of every employee’s daily workflows. The transformation of frontline work is coming. The only question is whether New Yorkers will move to take advantage of that trend — or get left behind as the AI revolution rewrites the rulebook for frontline teams.
Fabrice Haiat is co-founder and CEO of Midtown-based startup YOOBIC.
Fabrice Haiat , 2024-04-17 18:03:04
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