Bonus Episode: How Encouraging AI Use Will Benefit Your Organization

**Alison Ryder** (0:03)
Hi, Alison here. Today, we're dropping a bonus episode. In November, Sam was joined by the BCG Henderson Institute's Global Director, François Candelon, for a webinar based on our 2022 Collaborative Research Report, Achieving Individual and Organizational Value with AI.
If you're curious how individuals' personal use of AI at work connects with enterprise performance, give this episode a listen. We'll link the full webinar and report in our show notes.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:32)
François, we were thinking over the last few years, we've heard this storyline developing about how our human relationship to this technology is evolving. And one concern is always replacement. And an initial story was that AI was gonna replace people, but I think everyone has quickly realized how difficult that entire replacement will be. Entirely replacing humans is really tough. But so instead, I think we've all started thinking about task replacement more than job replacement. And certainly some tasks are much more amenable to AI than other tasks. We're likely to get AI benefits from some tasks much more quickly than with others. But this line of reasoning leads to comments like AI won't replace people, but people who use AI will replace people who do not use AI. I really like that sentiment because it recognizes that AI is a tool. AI itself does nothing. And what matters is how we humans use that tool. What matters is how we use AI. Lots of people are already using, and I, like Ranswath, deeply suspect that we're underreporting this because a lot of people may not be realizing that they're using AI. Using AI just isn't a binary thing. It isn't an on and off. It may not be in your face. Lots of variation in choice. What I do want to focus on is how people are actually getting value from AI. So we found our insight into how people are getting value from AI in what may be a, let's say, a surprising or an unlikely source. And that's the psychology, social psychology's self-determination theory. It's a foundation of human motivation and people's innate growth tendencies. And the concept of self-determination holds that people will have three basic psychological needs. They need to feel competent. They need to feel autonomous. And they need to feel related to others. And we thought that this could help us understand how people are getting value from AI. So I'll give you an illustration that goes through these components quickly. And then we'll go into detail about each one of them. And the first illustration comes from a company that you sort of initially might not expect to immediately associate with AI. And that's Land O'Lakes. So Land O'Lakes is a large member-owned cooperative agribusiness. They make lots of products. They make particularly dairy products that many of you may know. But what you may not know is that at Land O'Lakes, farmers are using data and AI to make smarter decisions than they've ever made before. And it's not hypothetical, it's working. For example, over the past 30 years, corn farmers have used advances in biotin engineering and chemicals and analytics to boost their average yields by 50% from like 120 bushels to 180 bushels per acre. And that's big.
But these advances kind of pale in comparison with future corn yields that Land O'Lakes thinks we can get from using AI. They've got demonstrations that promise to triple that average, going from like 180 bushels per acre to 540 bushels per acre. That's by the end of this decade.
What I like about the Land O'Lakes example is that many of these benefits aren't hypothetical. We're already seeing them. They're using extensive experimentation and complex algorithms. They're trying to provide AI-driven recommendations to help individual farmers be more productive. And so when we talked with Teddy Bekele, he's still the CTO of Land O'Lakes, we had a fascinating discussion about what kinds of things that they're doing. And what really struck us was how those three components of self-determination theory resonated through the examples that Teddy gave. And I really like this example, I think it's a great example. But I want to illustrate that we have not cherry picked this example. We found links to each of the three components of self-determination theory in other companies and on our survey data. So I can break down each one of these components with a few examples for each.
First, competency is about making better decisions. Self-determination theory says that individuals derive value when they feel more confident. They need to feel confident in how they perform their job. I mean, we just don't like technologies that make us feel dumb. It's just no fun. I know that I don't.
We were frustrated getting some aspects of this webinar getting going earlier this morning, and it just isn't fun to feel dumb.