This weblog is a write up of the LinkedIn post below.
LinkedIn Post 9/24/2024
LLMs and their intelligence tools will drive standards across industries in ways that companies have only imagined executing in the past – for better and for worse. Very little discussion on this to date. More on this to come.
There is much to unpack here, so let’s call this article 1 of 5.
Before we begin, it is important to define the scope of this writing. When I say that, “there is very little discussion on this to date”, I am speaking directly to the topic of driving standards in the workplace. There are many rabbit holes to chase and get trapped in when discussing this ocean of a topic. So to begin, it is important to unpack what it means to say, “LLMs and their intelligence tools will drive standards.”
Let’s start with this definition of standard by Merriam Webster:
standard (n) : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example : criterion
Companies are driven by standards that, more often than not, go unmet every day and in a variety of ways. We’re not going to explore or prove this here, so you’ll have to accept this as stated. These unmet standards lead to inefficiencies, errors, breakdowns, and sometimes dumb luck triumphs and innovations. This happens because the training, oversight, and enforcement of standards have never been perfect; we are human. But when new tools enter the domain of business that help companies achieve standards and perfect order, real shifts occur. These tools permit companies to change their training methods and adjust their resources as they ramp up their oversight and enforcement capabilities with these new machine tools doing the heavy lifting. It’s hard to envision a reality where any company that had the opportunity to perfect and drive its standards would rebel in doing so – think about brand standards for starters.
So what does it mean to drive standards? It means that with the onset of LLMs and their intelligence tools, the pendulum is swinging quickly to the far reaches of workplace uniformity (order) and it is hard to say how far and for how long this swing will last across the variety of industries in the global economy. The experiment is fully underway and until leadership has pursued and fully tested the limits there is no telling when the pendulum will reverse its course. There are so many areas to test and improve upon and lest we forget that the machines are learning alongside us as we go. We can’t begin to know what breakthroughs these [machine] efforts might make on their own, if any, but the race is on for those breakthroughs that will lead to new intellectual property (IP) for those who are participating. Participation is inevitable.
There’s no doubt in my mind that in the near to mid-term these efforts to drive standards will replace human ideas and ingenuity in strange ways. Strange primarily in the sense that I’m not at all convinced much of this replacement will be conscious to us at all. Sure, there will be more whistleblowers and non-profit advocacy groups, but all signs of human history point to the fact that their research and anecdotes will fall on deaf ears. The drive is too powerful, and to take this a step further, it’s deeply ingrained in our DNA. We can observe it in the general world around us and in the origins of the organization. We are created beings in a created universe in a created order. To drive standards is to pursue order.