How AI Will Change Collaboration

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

[Note: How AI Will Change Collaboration is an early version of a report that will be published following interviews with collaboration vendors and AI companies.]

Collaboration remains an essentially human task. Generative AI challenges notions of human-centricity. As I re-examined my 2024 Collaboration Portfolio: Features diagram, I found that it holds up to the injection of AI into collaborative workstreams.

The diagram already included AI assistants, analytics, and discovery, all of which had some level of presumed intelligence underlying them. I did add a new core service called co-creation/analysis, which more precisely aligns with generated content, summarization, and co-creation, such as content feedback and re-writing.

How those services manifest themselves will change the nature of each branch of the collaboration portfolio. This post attempts to cover all the ways collaboration features will likely employ generative AI in the future.

I did not include general areas, such as formula writing in Excel, as it fits into an even broader future of work domain around AIs’ impact on individual competencies and capabilities. Regardless of the tool or the domain, AI will play a role in helping people better use their tools. Collaboration tools will not be an exception.

This post, however, will focus on direct collaborative activities that will benefit from AI as part of a collaborative engagement, which, at this point, I believe will remain an engagement that takes place between two or more people (more on that later). I do not see the current generation of AI being capable of managing entire workstreams, but I do see it shortening the workstream execution durations…

To learn more about AI and how it can manage workstreams, check out: How AI Will Change Collaboration

About the author:

Daniel W. Rasmus, the author of Listening to the Future, is a strategist and industry analyst who has helped clients put their future in context. Rasmus uses scenarios to analyze trends in society, technology, economics, the environment, and politics in order to discover implications used to develop and refine products, services, and experiences. He leverages this work and methodology for content development, workshops, and for professional development.

Interested in AI? Daniel W. Rasmus is a member of the Advisory Board for our AI Impact 2024 event! Check out what Daniel, the rest of the Board, and TechTalk Summits have up our sleeves for this groundbreaking AI experience.