Remote Work impact on AI, and vice versa

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Remote work & AI impact

Welcome back to yet another AI deep dive – this time, with a work-from-home twist. We haven’t looked at the state of in-person v. hybrid v. remote work in a hot second, but considering just how many business leaders are singing the praises of returning to the office these days, I couldn’t resist a chance to check back on the topic.

If you’re a newer subscriber, let me be quite clear: I’m passionate about the work-from-home model. Although public sentiment has swung back and forth on it, I’ve generally remained suspicious of in-person work evangelists for years now.

And with generative AI shaking things up across the board, I’ve been curious about AI’s inevitable impact on remote work both now and in the near future.

To get a better sense of the on-the-ground relationship between the two, I welcomed CEO of Gister Andy Tryba onto a bonus episode of The Business of Tech.

From accelerating digital transformation to enabling work from home, here’s how Tryba is thinking about the lasting impact of AI.

Gigster’s POV on Digital Transformation

If you haven’t heard of Gigster before, here’s the rundown: self-described as a company that “accelerates the delivery of digital transformation,” Gigster is a firm that assembles cloud development teams with people from around the world into AI-enhanced teams that companies can then tap for various software projects. Most of Gigster’s clients are Fortune 500 organizations in need of very specific expertise to get an advanced project off the ground quickly.

While hiring individual teammates with machine learning or AI skill sets can take six months and cost a good amount of money per year, Gigster forms specialized teams in 24-48 hours. The projects they’re hired for most often include AI integration, leveraging OpenAI APIs, and very specific Web3 endeavors.

If it sounds to you like Gigster’s team would have a pretty accurate sense of practical AI use cases, you’d be correct. Beyond the content experimentation we’re seeing across many industries, Tryba is fascinated by the influx of API and data-oriented projects he’s seeing at Gigster. Many clients are turning to the platform to embed OpenAI’s various APIs directly into their products, and many are looking for more productive ways to pull information out of unused data sets.

AI and Employment

If Tryba’s perspective on emerging AI tactics weren’t interesting enough, he also has quite the view of the future of employment. And the whole ‘AI is coming for your jobs premise?’ Like me, he very much disagrees with it – and that’s coming from someone who’s in software, gig work, and AI itself. In his own words:

“From a software development perspective, if you look at the productivity that people can have with a lot of these AI tools that make them actually produce better code, be able to go through the code and do the auto finding of bugs and fixing of bugs, these are all things that make the software developer better. Therefore, you can do more things.”

On top of his belief that we’re heading for a renaissance of productivity, he’s also utilizing AI in two fascinating ways: evaluating the work of prospective teammates (literally using it to filter through thousands of applicants at a time), and building teams based on personal, AI-driven evaluations. That’s a huge part of why he’s able to deliver top-talent teams to clients in less than two days.

When I asked Tryba what he thinks of my personal premise that though AI won’t take jobs away, it might redistribute jobs to people who know how to use it well, he agreed, taking his support of AI a step further:

“Anyone really going into the workforce, even anyone in the workforce today, if you are not actively figuring out how I can use AI in my job, how I can really go to the advanced class of AI, how do I really go bring that into whatever I’m doing, then you are basically legacy at that point in time.”

Take it from him, folks!

AI and Remote Work

Gigster has been a remote company long before the pandemic, so Tryba has a lot to say on the subject – especially when it comes to how AI can improve the work-from-home landscape.

First, he pointed out the benefit on the recruiting side of things. The example he gave here is great: if you put together a football with the best players from your own city, that team will likely lose to a team assembled with the best players from across the country. And if you put the country’s best against a team filled with the best players from around the world, you’re also going to lose. So why would a company choose to hire only those who live in or are willing to move to their city?

Second, the execs publicizing their dislike for hybrid work and forcing teams back to the office, in Tryba’s view, haven’t done their homework to learn how to execute remote work well. A big thing he pointed out here is that in order to be successful as a remote company, everyone has to be remote. And in order to succeed in an in-person model, everyone has to be in the office at the same time. Trying to do both means you can’t reap the benefits of either.

Third, the leaders who couldn’t stand remote work didn’t properly alter their approach to digital tools. Assuming that people can communicate over Slack and Teams as they do in person won’t work, and replacing in-person meetings with a webcam also won’t work. Similarly, team bonding and culture can’t happen by attempting to simply replicate the in-person experience virtually.

For that last point, Tryga again tied it back to AI. He uses it to generate sentiment analysis and look at team dynamics, both during their formation and overtime. As you might expect from such a collaborative remote company, Gigster spends a lot of time on tech-forward team building.

With Gigster at the overlap of remote work, AI implementation, and, of course, the gig economy, there’s a lot to unpack from Tryga’s POV. To connect with Tryga and see what Gigster can do for your biz, head to www.Gigster.com.

Have any lingering thoughts? As always, I’m open to discussion at [email protected].

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