Radically Human: How AI-Powered And New Technologies Are Shaping Our Future

There are a lot of great books being published these days on the subject of artificial intelligence, as human authors attempt to tackle the technical, philosophical, and societal challenges posed by our growing reliance on smart machines.

One I have recently enjoyed and also found highly thought-provoking is Radically Human: How New Technology is Transforming Business and Reshaping our Future, by Paul Daugherty. Regular readers of my posts will know that Daugherty is CTO at Accenture, and in fact I recently enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation with him on the topic of the Metaverse Continuum – Accenture’s top four tech trend predictions for 2022.

While we were together (virtually), I also took the opportunity to talk to him about this latest book. It aims to explain many of the cutting-edge technologies that are revolutionizing business today – from AI to blockchain and the metaverse – but crucially to do it in a way that highlights the roles that humans will have to play if organizations hope to use them to their full potential.

In many ways, it is a follow-up to his previous book, 2018’s Human + Machine, Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, and like that book was also co-authored by H James Wilson.

Daugherty tells me, “We were really pleased with the reaction to Human + Machine … which we wrote because we wanted to correct the narrative we were hearing back then … that all the jobs were going to be destroyed and AI was going to be bad.”

Daugherty says that since then, he feels that the key messages of the book have played out fairly well, with most people coming to understand the potential benefits of AI rather than being fearful of the dangers.

Where Radically Human differs, however, is that it takes in a broader range of new and transformative technologies, including cloud and other developments which have been adopted with greater enthusiasm than even Daugherty expected.

“We saw how fast trends were advancing, and some things were moving even faster than we thought,” he said, when he joined me for a conversation, which you can watch in full here:

“We wanted to write Radically Human to talk about where this is really going and broaden the dialogue … think about the intersection of technology and human ingenuity [putting] together with the best of humans and the best of tech.”

Establishing the Radically Human narrative involved researching a whole array of different elements around technological adoption across business and society. It soon became apparent that what they were actually digging into was new paradigms for building organizations capable of leveraging the wealth of opportunity offered by digital transformation and overarching concepts such as the “fourth industrial revolution” and the metaverse.

One of the key findings that convinced them they were on the right track to understanding how the future will evolve was the realization that while pre covid, digital leader organizations appeared to be outperforming digital laggard organizations by a factor of two in many metrics, post-covid it increased dramatically to a factor of five.

Another key insight was the identification of a category that the authors considered as “leapfroggers” – those that managed to increase the distance between themselves and their competitors even more dramatically.

“Looking at how those companies operated, you really validated a lot of the ideas we had,” Daugherty said.