Firewalled employees are next on the firing line

Corporations prioritize compliance at the cost of learning

If you’ve ever tried to browse the internet through a work computer, you’d notice that you can’t load many websites.

Netflix is blocked, because it’s classified as entertainment. Facebook, Twitter, and even their professional counterpart LinkedIn are inaccessible because they are social media networks. This clump of websites are justifiably kept away from knowledge workers who may be too distracted to be productive otherwise. But there’s one banned subcategory that always leaves me yearning: online productivity tools.

I understand why tools like Notion, Google Docs, and even ChatGPT are blocked. These sites host information in the cloud, which big corporations flag as a security risk. As many leaks over the years have shown, anything that is on the internet can be hacked. Companies also don’t learn this mistake for free. When caught, they are either fined by regulators, sued by a related party, or lose business.

While the reasons are valid, I worry that these companies prioritize compliance without realizing the hidden cost: the lost opportunity for their employees to use new technology.

Any friend that works in a startup or a smaller, more agile business can tell you that they use the likes of Slack, Notion, and Prezi. Compare these nimble employees to lumbering white-collar workers in suits and it resembles a tortoise and a hare race. The hares exchange messages in warp speed, flinging one-liners as if in a real-life conversation, screens apart. The tortoises press ‘send’ on a thoughtful and thorough email that they spent many hours crafting.

Though Slack was only widely used within the last decade, there is an apparent divide between knowledge workers: those who keep up, and those who can’t. Guess which side most corporate workers reside?

As if the gap wasn’t apparent before, the distance will widen with a new slew of artificial intelligence tools flooding the market. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Bard are free for everyone to use, after all. Or at least, they are free to those that don’t have a firewall blocking such sites lest they pose security risk. So while free-internet-roaming employees are figuring out how to incorporate ChatGPT into their day-to-day workflow, firewalled employees are sequestered to using a thesaurus to craft their email.

This is not to say that firewalled employees can’t access tools in their free time. But realistically, not many employees would spend time outside of their 9-to-5 job learning how to use Notion AI unless they have a personal side project. And no, asking ChatGPT to come up with an itinerary for your next vacation is not the same thing. You won’t troubleshoot your vacation plans like you would a side hustle.

It irks me when Fortune 500 CEOs tout digitization and tech as a priority to future-proof the company. Knock, knock. The future is here. You’ve just firewalled it away from your employees.

It’s this same group of CEOs who will wake up three years later, realize they’ve lost speed against their more nimble counterparts, and push for employees to incorporate AI into their work. In old-corporate style, the IT department will then scramble to put together their own in-house large-language model (because in-house is the most secure way to build applications), and release a minimum viable product for internal use. Then employees would have to play catch-up to learn how to use this outdated LLM while non-firewalled knowledge workers run algorithmic circles around them.

We all know where this is heading. In exchange for loyalty and compliance to the company, management will try to replace its employees with more digital-savvy ones. The saying is true: AI will not take your job. Someone who knows AI will.

Or if that doesn’t happen, the big corporations, whose assets are mostly their own employees’ talent and expertise, would lose out to newer businesses. It’s the natural tide of commerce. Babylon was once a great empire, now it’s just history. The CEOs know this. Or at least I hope they do. But that would mean they’re consciously not doing enough to aid their employees learn.

Forget the internal training modules on AI. Nobody watches virtual lectures in school, and employees certainly won’t when their office hours are dedicated to generating revenue. One way I see that employees can learn is to allow for access to new-age productivity tools in a sandbox environment. Or to purchase an in-house version of these tools from the manufacturers of these new tech. These are expensive alternatives, but the cost of not being future-proof is far greater.

In other words: if things stay the same, the hare might just win.

Thank you to friends who help me constantly learn:

Linart Seprioto

and

Lilian Wanjiku Warutere

.

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Update log:

• 📕 I finished reading Burn Book by Kara Swisher. A true reporterpreneur, she was table to analyze business opportunities as it came while holding the most powerful voices in tech (and now more) accountable. It may be a cool memoir to look at,

  Charlie Bleecker
  .

• 🤳🏻 I had a culture shock from… TikTok culture (the platform is blocked in Hong Kong). On one hand, it has such a chokehold on people. On the other, it helps a new subculture emerge.

• 🦋 Taylor Swift was everything and the Eras tour now lives rent-free in my brain. I went without knowing the setlist and I was bedazzled in the best way.

• 🎁 Met up with

  Priya Nain
  , who gifted me William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and a nice bracelet.

• 🔗 Trying to scrape an RSS feed with Google Sheet’s IMPORTFEED function but it’s not returning all of the entries. By any chance anyone knows how to RSS scrape?

• 💡 Learned of FANOS (feelings, appreciation, needs, ownership, struggles), a check-in format for families. My favorite bit is that you cannot respond until the next day (h/t

  Taryn Arnold
  and Cammie’s podcast).

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