Dan Chuparkoff is a man who can get very enthusiastic very quickly on the topic of AI. And with good reason. Through working at companies including Google, McKinsey, and Atlassian, Chuparkoff has been watching the impact of innovation on teams for 30 years. That’s given him unique insights and practical methods to help businesses to build real products that solve real-world problems.
For the conference, his aim is to show attendees how AI is a “practical and understandable” technology that can help them in the workplace. “The first thing I want people to understand is how AI actually works and what AI is going to be good at, and not good at. Most people think about AI as if it’s this really smart human, except better in all measures. And that’s actually false,” he says.
“I’m going to help people understand that AI is a probability machine. It’s great at stuff that there is a lot of evidence for. But it’s going to fail spectacularly at things that are intricate, niche, and expert driven. What I help people do is first understand that fork in the road with AI’s capabilities.”
The next stage, says Chuparkoff, is to then “turn the lens back” on the kind of work being done by the attendees, and to divide “between the stuff that’s really niche, specific and expert driven, and the stuff that’s more commodity work.”
These latter aspects, such as taking notes in a meeting for example, AI can help with. But for an expert design consultant “trying to design a new kitchen that’s got some very weird properties? There are not hundreds of thousands of examples of that for AI to learn from, so you, as the expert in that space, will always be better at those kinds of things,” he explains.
Hierarchy of work
The impact of AI in all sectors is exponential, so how does Chuparkoff see the future of work changing? To predict that, he refers to an experience he had 16 years ago, when he was working for the software company Atlassian developing tools including Jira and Trello that helped people to track their workflow. That development taught Chuparkoff there are six levels to the ‘hierarchy of work’ that everyone does in their jobs, and that these can be viewed in a pyramid system, from the top level, as: imagine, decide, solve, investigate, process, and communicate.
“AI is going to be really good at helping with the bottom three layers of work,” he says. “Consuming information, making reports for clients, and pushing information back out to your industry. That’s the communication layer, and people spend a lot of time there. AI is going to be amazingly powerful at helping to squish that layer of work.”
Next comes the “rote process tasks on your ‘to do’ list – the instructions. That is stuff that AI will be great at streamlining. Then ‘investigation’ – the raising of issues, checking compliance, etc. – these are also things AI will be great at,” he says.
“But ‘solving, deciding and imagining’ are wholly different things. Those are not probability-based tasks. You want to solve a problem in a new and unique way or make a decision that makes you exceptional and innovative – such as imagining new kitchen designs that never existed before? AI won’t be good
at that,” he adds.
Solving the hard problems
For Chuparkoff, helping employees to consider this pyramid of work – and to figure out how to let AI take the load of those bottom three layers so they can spend more time imagining new and innovative ways to solve challenges in their industry – is the crux of how ‘the future of work’ will be realized. But how will this all impact foodservice, an industry where there is still plenty of latent nervousness that AI will undermine the ‘great food served with a smile’ central core of hospitality?
“It’s easy to imagine that there’s going to be robots walking around in kitchens or that we will take the servers out of restaurants and put robots in instead,” he says. “And while there are some tasks that they could do well, they won’t know the customer or understand their customer needs. They won’t have any empathy. That would be bad.”
Instead, he adds, we need to rethink how we fulfil the mundane hospitality tasks that automation and AI can do, freeing up servers to focus on the customer. “Don’t imagine a robot server. Instead, imagine a smart cable that can do nothing else except refill the water glasses.
“Now, your servers are not running around the restaurant refilling water glasses every four seconds but purposefully coming over to the table to check on the customer experience. Having a conversation,” he says. “Let’s remove the repetitive thing that’s done half a billion times a week with an automation process so that people can spend more time solving hard problems and making better decisions about how to make the customer experience unforgettable,” he says.
Many foodservice and hospitality brands have been using AI and automation successfully for years, says Chuparkoff. He cites how CAD software pioneers Autodesk “have been thinking about this problem for 15 years” using AI image recognition to help run simulations of designs used in AutoCAD and Revit for Building Information Modeling (BIM). “Those software features are already driving amazing intelligence into the design process,” he adds. “With BIM you can get from plans to materials lists and building codes, evaluation, and other intelligence. AutoCAD has been leading the way on what AI-powered design might look like for a long time, and they’ll continue to push the industry in that direction.”
Chuparkoff has a longstanding fascination with harnessing the power of innovation, and revels in his role of AI educator. “I love that we have this amazing new superpower that can help us do a bunch of things that we don’t have time to do. AI will make the burden a little lighter. It’s super fulfilling for me when people tell me how they implemented some of these things in their lives.”
At the conference he will also host an ‘AI deep dive’ breakout session for consultants. “That session is going to be more interactive and hands-on – a toolkit of things to try next. That’s the goal. I try to bring a very optimistic, forward-looking perspective on AI, because it’s easy to get the doom and gloom perspective from the internet. I think the future is bright. There’s an amazing collection of opportunities for all of us, and I want to help,” he says.
Michael Jones
