“ IN THE AGE OF AI & AUTOMATION, YOU ARE THE ONES ENSURING WE DON’T LOSE OUR HUMANITY IN THIS PROCESS. YOU ARE THE GUARDIANS OF WORKPLACE CULTURE, & THAT IS WHY WHAT YOU DO MATTERS SO PROFOUNDLY.” WENDY HARRIS, VP OF EMEA, RIPPLING
HUMANS ARE NOT MACHINES – GETTING THE BALANCE WRONG To illustrate the difference between the operating abilities of human and machine, Harris opened with a personal story about the brutal working hours expected of a trader at Goldman Sachs, the investment firm. As a trader, her working environment was built on speed, pressure and precision. She worked 12 hour days, had nine trading screens, and was immersed in a culture of constant vigilance. She also described the moment her body forced a reckoning. “I used to get up at 4:30am every single day and
started work at 6am,” she said. I worked 12 hour days on the trading floor, and I loved it, and really excelled there. But I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner at my desk because you are never allowed to be away from your screens in case something happens to one your stocks. I was there on the trading floor when the Twin Towers were hit.” Then in October 2008 Harris was still at the office
at 9pm on a Friday evening and the US market had just closed, and she was about to call her client to give them their trade report, when she had a seizure. “All of a sudden, I felt this piercing pain at the back
of my neck, and then I felt my right side go numb, and I realised my tongue felt too large for my mouth. In that moment, as I was trying to dial a number, my headset disconnected from the console, and I fell to the ground, and I had what would turn out to be the first of many seizures. Luckily for me, despite the fact it was 9pm on a Friday night, there was still one other person on the Goldman Sachs trading floor, and that person called the ambulance, and as I was being strapped to the gurney, I remember trying to formulate the words to tell him to call our client with our trade report. That’s what I was thinking about.” That moment revealed a brutal truth. Harris was
thinking about the client, not herself, and she had been treating her body like a machine. “I had been forgetting my human nature and if I am
really honest, there had been so many red flags up until this point, but I ignored every single one of them. While
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my story may be extreme, it is an example of what happens when we forget that we’re humans and we’re not machines.” Harris’ story captured a theme that would run
throughout the session: technology should free people from the work that erodes their wellbeing, not push them to operate at machine-level intensity.
WHAT IS THE VALUE OF HUMANS IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION? Harris turned to the existential anxiety now circulating through organisations. As AI expands into decision- making, screening, scheduling and analytics, employees increasingly wonder where they fit. The question of what the future of work might hold reverberates across job levels. It does not stem solely from fear of redundancy, she explained, but from uncertainty about identity, contribution and meaning. “Technology increases productivity without any
of those pesky human limitations, so software is never going to get wheeled out in a stretcher,” she said. “This uncertainty creates a profound identity crisis for workers at every single level in your companies, and it is not just about job security, it’s actually about their sense of purpose and value.” For example, according to a report in February 2024
by the CIPD, 72 per cent of large UK employers are already using AI in their talent acquisition or recruiting processes, but only 23 per cent of them have any human oversight whatsoever. PwC says that 30 per cent of UK jobs are at risk of automation by the early 2030s. Harris said that these are “not just abstract
numbers” but real people with real jobs and families and hopes and dreams. “It creates a culture of fear. People are afraid of losing
their jobs. It creates resistance to change, and it creates a scarcity mindset. There is a lot of noise about automation and jobs going away, and it is really scary at times.”
MAKING THE MOST OF HUMAN POTENTIAL Harris did have a positive message for delegates, however, that “automation isn’t replacing humans, it is
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