Enhancing Workforce Productivity with AI Tools

I grew up in a coal mining town, the son of a coal miner. It is a small place in Western Pennsylvania where industries have come and gone. It began with the foundries and factories. The steel mills closed just before the mines began to close. The mines were in the midst of closing when the fracking wells came in. The wells are mostly automated, so the jobs did not last beyond the construction and initial operations of the wells. It is a place where labor and a hard day’s work remained a fixture of many modest homes in the area. It was precisely the place where a tale like that of John Henry defeating the steam machine would resonate, and it did. The fear zero sum. Innovation meant that fewer human hands would be needed to drive the economic output of the company…and the town. That’s why the idea of John Henry defeating the steam engine by driving more drills, even if he died with his hammer in his hand, resonated. Years later, I see parallels with the conversation around how AI will impact workforces across industries. Some argue that AI will put jobs at risk or outright replace them. Others argue that humans will be freed from rote tasks to focus on deeper work. The problem with how this conversation is unfolding is that we are viewing it the same way as we viewed the John Henry issue. John Henry either could drive more drills in the railroad than the steam engine or not and if he could not, he, along with the millions of laborers he represented, would lose their jobs. What the story misses is how human productivity can be enhanced by innovation to increase the productivity of individual workers at scale. The choice is not whether we use a human OR a machine for a given task; we can have both . The organizations that will truly succeed in AI implementation are those that have a vision for an AI-driven future that increases the productivity of individual team members augmented by AI, not replaced by AI. For every $1 you spend on an AI solution, you should be getting $3 back in topline revenue due to a measurable increase in individual productivity. We no longer need John Henry to die with the hammer in his hands (not that we ever did). We need the individual unit of work to result in more output. That’s how we will see economic growth and AI is the key . Subscribe now How AI Drives Individual Productivity AI’s capacity to increase individual productivity can be illustrated with specific use cases: Legal: Current Challenge: Attorneys and paralegals spend hour on research and discovery document processes that takes away their time for strategy creation and time with clients. AI Solution: Private large language models (LLM) can give attorneys and paralegals the ability to quickly and accurately search large volumes of documents quickly to find individual insights to aid in case preparation. Impact: Attorneys spend more time on legal strategy and preparing their clients and less time working through large volumes of discovery files. Manufacturing: Current Challenge: Production processes are time-intensive and prone to human error. AI Solution: AI-powered robotics and computer vision systems can inspect products for defects, automate assembly line tasks, and predict equipment maintenance needs. Impact: Workers are relieved of monotonous tasks and can contribute to innovation and quality control, boosting overall output. Government Services: Current Challenge: Citizens often face long wait times for services like tax filings, license renewals, or public assistance programs. AI Solution: Chatbots and AI-driven platforms can process applications, answer citizen queries, and even detect fraudulent activities. Impact: Civil servants can focus on policy-making and program development, while citizens experience improved service delivery. Finance: Current Challenge: Financial advisors and analysts spend significant time combing through data to create reports and strategies. AI Solution: Machine learning models can analyze market trends, identify risks, and generate investment recommendations in real-time . Impact: Financial professionals can focus on relationship-building and personalized client strategies, leading to increased customer satisfaction and business growth. Economic Growth Through Productivity Gains When workers across sectors can achieve more in less time, economies grow. AI contributes to this growth in several ways: Innovation: With routine tasks automated, individuals and teams can dedicate more energy to creative problem-solving and innovation. Efficiency: Industries can produce goods and services faster and at lower costs, making them more competitive in global markets. New Market Opportunities: AI enables the development of entirely new products and services, creating industries that didn’t previously exist, such as autonomous vehicles or personalized digital healthcare. Enhanced Workforce Participation: By reducing physical and cognitive barriers, AI tools can help more individuals, including those with disabilities, participate in the workforce. With opportunities like these, leaders can expect to get more output from their current headcount resulting in higher profit margins and capital that can be allocated to broader marketing, new product development, or new market research. These are advantages that firms that smartly implement AI will enjoy at the expense of competitors who are slow to adopt. Share AI as a Partner, Not a Replacement Letting your experts actually be experts is where value will be created. Instead of having your experts spending hours on travel vouchers, you can implement automation to give them the time they need to focus on clients, research, or whatever human-centered activity brings your organization the most value. When AI can be implemented to take over routine and repeated tasks, you have room to bring new skills to your workforce. The reskilling opportunities are another way to bring value to your customers by building a workforce that boasts strong retention and unique value relative to competitors. Rather than starting from a place of potential replacement, the starting position should be how AI can augment workers and the measurement is the increase in individual productivity. Since AI tools like those above can be implemented for a variety of use cases, the productivity increase factor can be deployed at scale across enterprises to create exponential productivity increases across business units. However, to get to this place, we must think of human-AI productivity from a position of augmentation, not as a zero sum. John Henry, Molly Pitcher, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and Captain Stormalong from American folklore. The John Henry story might sound like a victory of the human spirit over the evil machines at first glance, but I’ve been hearing this story for many years. The more you listen to the story, the sadder it sounds. Yes, John Henry proved he could defeat the machine, but it literally killed him on the spot. Instead of measuring success by which of the two could drive more drills, the company leadership should have taken the total drills completed by both of them as the measurement against an all-human workforce. Imagine how quickly the railroad would have been laid if John Henry worked beside the machine instead of against it. That’s how we should consider AI. Not as a technology that will alleviate the need for humans but as one that frees humans to concentrate on what they are best at. Things like strategy, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. Each of those qualities is enhanced by better data and by more available time. John Henry will remain a folk hero next to figures like Paul Bunyan and a part of the American spirit. But business leaders should learn the right lesson: Technology increases the individual productivity of human workers and, deployed at scale, creates new economic growth for a long-term competitive advantage. Leave a comment Connect with us: LinkedIn , Bluesky , X , Website To learn more about the services we offer, please visit our product page. Nick Reese is the cofounder and COO of Frontier Foundry and an adjunct professor of emerging technology at NYU. He is a veteran and a former US government policymaker on cyber and technology issues. Visit his LinkedIn here . This post was edited by Thomas Morin, Marketing Analyst at Frontier Foundry. View his Substack here and his LinkedIn here .