As companies look for ways to put artificial intelligence to work, much of the focus has been on what the technology can do.
Ray Rasmussen believes companies also need to focus on the people being asked to use it.
Rasmussen, Managing Principal at rGen Consulting, works with organizations trying to understand how AI can improve their businesses while preparing employees for the changes that come with it. Speaking with Developers.Net at TechCon 365, DATACON & PWRCON in Seattle, Rasmussen said some of the biggest challenges aren’t necessarily technical.
“There are people who see AI as a threat to their competence,” Rasmussen said. “They’re good at things, and they’re afraid that this is going to eclipse their competence.”
Rather than dismissing that concern, Rasmussen believes companies can help employees see AI as something that extends what they’re capable of doing.
“We want to move them from someone who is feeling like they’re threatened by AI to someone who can exploit AI,” he said.
Invite People to Complain
One of the ways rGen gets employees thinking about AI doesn’t begin by asking them what they want to automate.
Rasmussen invites them to complain.
Employees already know what frustrates them about their work. Those frustrations can provide a starting point for figuring out where AI might actually be useful.
“In each of those complaints is an opportunity for improvement,” Rasmussen said.
He said putting employees around a table and asking what isn’t working can quickly uncover problems they have expert knowledge about because they experience them every day.
“The distance between complaints and ideas is actually pretty short,” Rasmussen said.
The difference is that employees aren’t being handed an AI tool and told to find something to do with it. They’re starting with a problem they already want solved and discovering how AI might help them solve it.
When those ideas begin producing results, Rasmussen said people gain confidence.
He described one rGen client with roughly 300 employees that went from essentially no AI agents or automation to nearly 1,000 agents.
“They suddenly realized that they could fix everything,” Rasmussen said.
The shift didn’t happen because every experiment worked. Rasmussen said leadership has to create an environment where employees can try something and adjust when it doesn’t work as expected.
But the successes matter.
“Those modest successes are what change everything,” he said. “And you suddenly get traction.”
That’s when Rasmussen said AI adoption becomes as much about culture as technology.
“This is not about eliminating positions,” Rasmussen said. “This is about supercharging human beings.”
From Operator to Designer-Operator
What that can eventually change is the role employees play in their own work.
Rasmussen describes it as moving from an operator to a designer-operator.
“In many jobs, we have people who are operators,” Rasmussen said. “They do a piece of work, or they finish a thing, or they create reports, or whatever they’re doing, and they operate.”
AI can give those employees an opportunity to do more than follow an existing process.
“What the transition we’re asking people to make is to change from operator to designer-operator,” Rasmussen said. “So you no longer just operate the machine, you re-envision the machine.”
That puts the employee’s knowledge of the work in a different context.
Someone who understands a process also knows where that process creates problems. With AI, people can increasingly participate in changing how the work gets done rather than simply continuing to do it the same way.
“The power here is not the tool and technology alone, but that tool and technology combined with their imagination,” he said.
That doesn’t mean turning every employee into an AI engineer.
Rasmussen said rGen focuses instead on creating “user-level fluency,” giving employees enough understanding of the tools to begin applying them to their own work.
“I’m not making everybody an engineer,” he said. “We are making people fluent as a user of these tools.”
The Human Element Between Technology and the Outcome
Rasmussen’s interest in the people using technology goes back much further than the current AI boom.
He began his technology career as an engineer at IBM and later worked in consulting before serving as Strategy Lead at Microsoft.
Even early in his career, Rasmussen said he saw a problem with assuming that good technology would naturally lead to good results.
“Even in those days, I had concluded it’s actually the human element that was the distance between a great set of tools and a great outcome,” he said.
That idea eventually became part of what led him to rGen.
The tools have changed dramatically since Rasmussen began his career. With AI, they’re changing faster than ever. But his focus remains on closing the gap between what the technology can do and what people are able to do with it.
For Rasmussen, success comes when employees begin recognizing that capability for themselves.
“When you get a team to coalesce around a problem, solve that problem, build confidence, build skills, it becomes its own momentum,” he said. “It’s a profoundly satisfying experience to see people take the reins of their own lives and their own work, and it makes us proud when they’re successful.”
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