How AI could kill ‘corporate ick’

Imagine a workplace where you spend less time attached to a keyboard, worrying about how to word an email, write a report, craft a LinkedIn post, polish a presentation deck, or sound professional enough in an office-wide memo. Instead, you stop hunching over a keyboard and start talking your way through a written correspondence, the way you might with another person. Such a workplace may not be as far off as you imagine, according to Calum MacDougall, president of the enterprise division at audio equipment brand Jabra. Whether office culture actually keeps pace, though, is another question. “The keyboard was invented in 1868, when Ulysses S. Grant was president—and it’s probably the only thing invented in 1868 that you still have in your office right now,” MacDougall tells Fast Company. “So it seems natural at some point that technology should be able to overtake it to create something new.” AI will become more and more important in the workplace, he says, which is far from a controversial opinion. But he believes “the future will be here quicker than we think.” “The way that you will want to communicate with your [AI] agents will be increasingly in the way that you communicate wi…