The race to win with artificial intelligence is on, yet many companies might still be reading the user manual.
That’s the sense of Sarah Franklin, CEO of the HR software company Lattice.
“People who say that they’re super far advanced are just not being honest,” she told Business Insider. “There’s nobody that’s crushing it right now.”
That’s because generative AI is still a new technology, Franklin said.
“There is nobody today with 10 years of agentic AI experience; we’re all on the same starting line,” she said.
Sometimes, that line can be blurry.
Lattice drew criticism last year after the company said it would help employers add AI employees to its people platform. The idea was that, like humans, the digital workers would be “onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access, and even a manager. Just as any person would be,” Franklin wrote in a July 2024 blog post on the company’s website.
Lattice said days later that it wouldn’t pursue adding digital workers in its software product.
However, Franklin said business leaders need to be clear about how they plan to incorporate AI into their operations.
She said one use could be having an AI agent work as a sales development rep, feeding leads to human colleagues.
The technology could talk with customers on a company’s website or via phone, sending information about new features, Franklin said. It could also save human sales teams from some of the drudgery of chasing leads.
“Do you really want to pick up the phone all day and do this, or do you want to have some good, qualified prospects to talk to?” Franklin said.
Efficiency at a price
Franklin said that, too often, corporate leaders focus on how AI can bring efficiencies. Instead, she said, the goal should be to help everyone understand the opportunities AI brings to scale themselves.
That means using AI to give workers “superpowers to where they feel like they’re stepping into the Iron Man suit” and accomplishing what they need to at work without feeling overwhelmed, Franklin said.
She said that might include using AI to give each employee at a company an executive assistant or an executive coach — the types of resources traditionally limited to the upper ranks because of budget constraints.
Frankin said AI might help everyday workers stay on top of tasks, attend meetings and take notes, and offer tips on how to grow in their roles.
She added that workers might be more willing to ask questions of their Jarvis sidekicks than they would of colleagues because there’s no risk of looking silly to AI.
“From a leader’s perspective, it’s more about focusing on the people first, and then how AI is in service of their success, and then people gravitate toward that,” Franklin said.
The missing element
One risk for CEOs who focus on efficiency is that businesses rely too much on bots and not the people who can help a company differentiate itself, said Franklin, who previously worked as chief marketing officer at Salesforce.
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That, she said, could lead to robots talking to robots, which would mean there aren’t customers to consume a company’s service and, ultimately, the business could collapse.
“That’s what I think is missing today — is a focus on the people success,” Franklin said.
She said she saw recent comments from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the impact of AI as a call to action to learn AI.
Amodei warned in May that AI could wipe out half of entry-level office jobs within five years, while Altman wrote in a recent blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity” that humans had crossed the event horizon by building systems that are “smarter than people in many ways.”
These comments, Franklin said, are a reminder that the AI transformation is happening — and that people need to ready themselves. Because we haven’t seen past technological revolutions unfold so quickly, she said, the rise of AI can be difficult to digest.
Franklin said that’s one reason leaders need to be “transparent, accountable, and responsible” for the path we’re taking.
“People are afraid, and we have to be courageous,” she said.
