In a recent article in Harvard Business Review on AI and machine learning, Renee Richardson Gosline makes a case for leveraging friction in customer interactions to improve decision making. Specifically, she writes:
“Friction isn’t always a bad thing, especially when companies are looking for responsible ways to use AI. The trick is learning to differentiate good friction from bad, and to understand when and where adding good friction to your customer journey can give customers the agency and autonomy to improve choice, rather than automating the humans out of decision-making.”
Including a broad and diverse spectrum of stakeholders in the decision-making process is essential to collective intelligence -- an efficient and effective way to elicit insights, knowledge, and even opinions from people within and tangential to your business. Collective intelligence encompasses employees as well as customers, consultants, investors, and advisors to your organization.
Collective intelligence works best to deliver decisions aligned with everyone’s insights when your ecosphere includes a diversity of views, not just the C-suite executives who might overlook a different, innovative approach suggested by someone down the corporate ladder.
Generating different points of view can also create hostility and bad friction during the collaboration process. Bias based on gender, race, age, and rank can creep in when participants are identified by name. That’s why it’s important to turn the conversation into good friction by allowing everyone to add their viewpoints anonymously. This way ideas and opinions can be generated freely without fear of retribution or shaming. And good friction allows for the widest possible range of insights to be generated.
Given human-generated friction, though, how do you extract the signal from the noise? That’s where AI technologies come in. AI software has the power to refine and align the friction of ideas generated by your stakeholders, taking their insights to a higher level. Good AI -- like good friction -- can help you achieve your business goals by offering these assets:
- The simplicity of implementation with ready-to-go templates that require no or little training for you and your staff.
- The ability to scale and to work quickly, delivering results in hours or days, not weeks or months.
- Delivering results that are easily understood and actionable.
- Archiving collaborations so you can base future decisions on earlier insights.
CrowdSmart was developed to meet all these objectives as a streaming service. Combining the power of collective intelligence with its patented AI software that refines the signal from the noise, CrowdSmart can lead to your organization or company making better decisions, imagining new possibilities, and building employee and customer engagement to move your team forward together.
Check out CrowdSmart.ai.
