The human in the loop

At the risk of writing yet another email about AI, I've been thinking less about what AI can do and more about what remains stubbornly human. The whole world appears high on AI, yet many of us are already tired of hearing about it.

When we rely on expert advice, whether from an accountant, doctor, lawyer or investment manager, we're not only paying for knowledge. We're paying for trust in someone's judgement, a concept that has evolved over millennia, and is unlikely to be thrown out with the bathwater as new intelligence systems are introduced into our lives.

What happens when judgements disagree?

So what happens when your AI investment manager recommends a pathway your trusted advisor has warned you against? When an AI-assisted healthcare system reaches a different conclusion to an experienced clinician? How will we navigate this hellscape? More positively, how do we make peace with AI, harness its potential, and trust its applications, without having to think, talk and hear about it 24/7?

The values this rests on

These questions have come up repeatedly in conversations around Antlar. For me, the answer starts with values. Here are ours:

• Deliberate transparency. What we're trying to achieve, and why, is plain to our customers, partners and team-mates. No guesswork required.
• Momentum builds excitement. The direction of travel must feel like it's heading somewhere, and remain fun. When customers and partners succeed because of something we've built, we treat that success as our own.
• Every hire counts. High-calibre people in every role. High trust in each other to execute and ask for help when needed. The compounding effect over time is 10-100x.
• Professional challenge. Feedback is sought, encouraged and acted on. When something isn't working as it should, we get in a room and deal with it.

Out of this comes our answer to the AI question. We are designing Antlar, the business, the product and the culture, to keep a human in the loop on all decision-making, and we will never use technology as a substitute for human judgement.