I’ll admit I never was as good at delegating as I should have been. If you’re surrounded by good people, which I’ve been fortunate always to have been, you need to trust them. But future organizations may find themselves confronting a new question: How trusting can you be when some of your “people” aren’t actually people?
Irwin Lazar has an interesting post on No Jitter in which he looks at the impending transition from generative AI capabilities to agentic AI. This evolution aims to deliver on the AI promise, Irwin writes, as employees use AI to forge new ways of working, rather than just using the technology to improve on their existing processes. Central to the transition is the concept of the digital twin.
“A collaboration digital twin is a model trained on your specific communication style, your project history, and your decision-making patterns…. The abilities of the digital twin are only constrained by its access to data and apps, and by the abilities granted to it,” Irwin writes. “In the future, digital twins will handle multi-step processes, such as identifying a project delay, rescheduling the necessary stakeholders, and updating the project team through a chat channel, all without human action.” Digital twins may autonomously attend meetings, respond to inquiries, or notify colleagues about project status, delays, etc., according to Irwin.
I guess I’m a digital twin skeptic. I have to wonder if communications is a unique use case, one that can’t be automated as easily as, say, a factory floor. Often, communications is not how you get the work done; it is the work.
Here’s what I mean: One of the major criticisms of using generative AI for writing is that not only is the copy flat, trite, and easily detected as AI, but that it short-circuits a critical step, since the writing process itself is often the way a person figures out what they really mean, by helping to stress-test ideas. If you can’t say it clearly, you probably haven’t conceived it clearly. As the saying goes, writing is thinking.
Similarly, you could say that communicating is collaborating. It’s not exchanges of words; it’s exchanges of ideas, goals, emotions. It’s not just a surface thing, like telling someone a fact or a date. It relies massively on context, and is also the process people use to teach, model, evaluate, advocate, and validate not just their ideas, but their own worthiness as a productive part of the process. They call it knowledge work for a reason. Communication is how you demonstrate your knowledge.
Offloading communications-intensive parts of your role to a digital twin will require a level of trust in that agent that I don’t believe many knowledge workers are currently ready to sign up for. What’s more, everyone will have to trust everyone else’s digital twins – not just that their colleague knows how to use the technology effectively, but will deploy it appropriately and judiciously, and that the resulting organizational culture isn’t destructive, detached, or toxic.
The technology processes Irwin describes are incredibly complex, fraught with potential gaps and unforeseen pitfalls. The corresponding human processes are exponentially harder. As a result, making digital twin technology work flawlessly – which I think it kind of has to if it’s going to do more good than harm – doesn’t seem like a near-term prospect to me.
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