A Host of New Nifty AI Work Tools

For many workers, artificial intelligence has been, aside from Chatgpt, mostly all talk. Too many new tools for the workplace were clunky and inaccurate.

That could be changing rather quickly, as cutting-edge pens and pins and glasses and apps are increasingly helping knowledge workers in daily meetings and important conversations, often by tossing in key pieces of information or data at opportune times. Indeed, seventy-five percent of employees are using AI at work, according to Microsoft. In some ways, the tools are already taking out all the preparation and refreshing reading that knowledge workers have to grind through for decades to get ahead.

The key help these tools are providing is preparation, which has drained many knowledge workers for decades Still, experts say leaning on these technologies in the office continues to carry risks. “Treat them as if they’re very talented interns,” says managing partner Bryan Ackerman, head of AI strategy and transformation at Korn Ferry. “The big danger is not checking the answers that come back.”

The workplace is at a technology watershed moment for knowledge workers. Gadgets are increasingly untethered from computers: in international business, smart glasses with real-time language translators are a norm, and niche specialties have adopted devices like smart glasses and pins in places like production lines and science labs and warehouses, where technology has been quicker to perfect repetitive uses, such as cameras “seeing” a view ahead, advising employees on what to do next. In factories, the smart glasses work double duty as protective glasses.

To be sure, there are wide gaps. Smart cameras still struggle to dependably identify new scenes or people and provide proper information. And in the workplace, current technologies are unable to accomplish much-needed tasks such as personalized job searching and matching; nor dynamic workforce planning. Yet suddenly, leaders are seen toting—and actually using—high-tech gear in niche scenarios, following years of trying out new gadgets and putting them in a drawer. “Everything is clunky until it’s not,” says Chris Cantarella, global sector leader in the software practice at Korn Ferry.

Many of these technologies are newfangled. For example, some smart glasses can function as monitors, functioning with a simply keyboard or pen, and a WiFi connection. And smart pens can easily digitize designs or notes or spoken meetings, with nary a laptop in sight. Whether or not executives currently use these devices is, at this point, “a matter of personal preference,” says Paul Fogel, sector leader in the consumer and technology practice at Korn Ferry. “I haven’t seen a massive productivity boost.”

Experts advise extreme caution around user inputs. The most common threat is generative AI models that train on user input, meaning that after a leader enters corporate data into a tool, the model has free reign to provide that data in someone else’s answer, creating a data security problem. Organization’s own enterprise tools have often negotiated out these issues, says Cantarella, but entering corporate data into other tools will likely result in security problems. This is a mushrooming problem: Seventy-eight percent of employees who use AI at work say they are bringing in their own tools, according to Microsoft data from May. At the same time, few users consider how organizations are monitoring employees based on AI usage. “I don’t think people have a grasp of what’s going on,” says Cantarella.

And then there are outputs. Earlier this year, a mainstream AI tool attracted the attention of the internet by suggesting that cheese could be stopped from sliding off pizza by adding Elmer’s Glue. This incident should bring trepidation to anyone who has every quickly asked a question to a generative AI tool mid-meeting, and then announced it to the meeting. “You might just end up with egg on your face,” says Fogel.  

Learn more about Korn Ferry's capabilities around AI in the Workplace. 

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