In our last blog post, we talked about the power of bringing people together to multiply intelligence, creating smarter teams and smarter organisations.

What were your thoughts on that? Have you found ways where you can create opportunities for being smarter together at work, and beyond? If so, please practice collective intelligence by sharing your comments below as it can help trigger ideas for others too. Thank you!

You see, what every organisation and every leader need to ask themselves is this:

How can we unlock more of our collective intelligence?

And with that in mind, let’s continue our exploration of Collective Intelligence by turning to the subject of Artificial Intelligence.

Pretty much everyone talks about AI now.

What’s going on where you work, has your organisation started their AI journey?

Are you talking about it, are you exploring how AI can work for you?

It’s certainly true that AI is here to stay and that we all need to embrace AI or be left behind.

And we definitely think there are many exciting opportunities that come with AI – to be able to automate repetitive work, to free up people’s time to do more enjoyable tasks, to create solutions in all industries that we could previously only dream of.

As you probably know, artificial intelligence doesn’t mean that machines can think (not yet at least), it just means that they are doing something that seems intelligent – like recognizing patterns in data and predicting outcomes.

There are of course also big question marks around AI, such as how to ensure ethical practices through the creation of ethical and non-biased algorithms. These discussions will continue to evolve as AI evolves. But that’s not what we wanted to talk about today (we’ll come back to that in a future blog post).


“Some people call this artificial intelligence,

but the reality is this technology will enhance us.

So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.”

Ginni Rometty


Just as Collective Intelligence is human + human (as discussed in the previous post), it’s also human + artificial. Intelligence is multiplied when the two forms of intelligence are brought together, contributing through their unique intelligence strengths.

Sometime in the (distant) future, machines are expected to be able to do anything humans do, but we are still a long way away from that scenario. There are still things that humans are better at than machines, and there are things that machines are better at than machines. And this gives us food for thought on how the two forms of intelligence can contribute to great outcomes – together.

HUMANS are currently better at

  • Emotion and empathy
  • Creative thinking
  • Planning and executing a plan
  • Consciousness

MACHINES are currently better at

  • Storing large amounts of data
  • Processing and analysing large amounts of data
  • Pattern recognition (if there is enough data)

Looking at those two lists of human and artificial strengths, what does that tell us?

Well, for example, that if we can use machines to process and analyse large amounts of data, we can free up time and get on with the creative thinking process, in collaboration with other people. We are getting the best of two worlds; we are making use of unique human and artificial strengths. We can be smarter together, creating more intelligent organisations.

Where have you seen examples of human + artificial intelligence creating more intelligent organisation? And what other opportunities do you think there could be for smarter teams and organisations, keeping in mind that the human to human interactions are crucial and set the tone for everything we do?