At Koch, we believe that as artificial intelligence continues to mature, it will drive competitive advantage for organizations that embrace it at scale, accelerate value creation and individual empowerment, and expand the frontiers of human knowledge.
That will only be accomplished, however, if we can distill the hype surrounding publicly available tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini from AI’s real-world transformative potential for businesses and individuals. Technology, for the sake of technology, doesn’t lead to transformation or profits. Moreover, with AI, there are plenty of challenges, including ethical dilemmas and bias, legal and compliance concerns, and potential job displacement fears, that must be strategically managed and purposefully addressed.
Koch’s principle-based approach is our beacon as we embrace this new technology and start to make decisions consistent with our beliefs and values on how and when to use AI, ensuring this technology advances human progress in a mutually beneficial way for businesses and our employees. Central to this transformation is our conviction that AI will not supplant human ingenuity and intelligence but complement and amplify it.
What differentiates Koch from many other businesses is how we apply our risk philosophy to the challenging decisions surrounding when and how to adopt AI. Jump in too quickly and without guardrails and you could expose yourself to business and reputational risks, cyberattacks or the loss of intellectual property. Remain too cautious and you’ll miss out on a potential opportunity to empower your employees, transform how you do business and gain a competitive advantage (or lose share to those who figure it out faster).
Our current approach to building AI capabilities includes asking our leaders to empower employees to experiment within their teams to expand their knowledge of these emerging technologies, accelerate personal transformation, and share their newly acquired knowledge to contribute to the profitable deployment of AI.
We empower our employees to use principles of economic thinking to optimize for risk and seek solutions and advancements in AI that positively affect their day-to-day work. If we had waited to try and mitigate every imaginable risk, we would have lost out on a groundswell of innovation currently happening across Koch.
Here are a few examples of how Koch is learning and attempting to leverage AI, including generative AI, to help our employees become more productive, make better decisions and help them discover new gifts and talents.
AskFred
The Principle Based Management™ group has partnered with Koch Global Services for several months to develop AskFred, an AI-driven chatbot to tutor employees as they apply PBM principles in their work.
Inspired by Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, we are teaching AskFred PBM materials such as supervisor responsibilities and expectations, Our Values and the five dimensions. So far, development and testing have primarily focused on AskFred engaging with supervisors as a coach to stimulate critical thinking, make informed decisions and practice conversations.
In coming weeks, the team will prepare AskFred to help all employees (not just supervisors) and test it with a larger group of employees before introducing it to the entire organization.
Plant Operations
Georgia-Pacific is using AI to help monitor and analyze data from thousands of sensors placed in machines across its more than 140 manufacturing facilities. The application of AI (and associated machine learning approaches) allows us to build predictive models that alert operators with a high level of precision when a machine or a critical part inside of a machine is likely to fail. This provides remote and onsite personnel with crucial information, helping them make decisions that reduce unplanned downtime for machines and keep the plant operating at peak efficiency.
We are also adding generative AI capabilities to our plants. Upon discovering an alert or fault, operators will be able to interact with intelligent chatbots that have learned from volumes of manuals and other relevant documents and materials to help employees find an appropriate solution.
Finance
Our finance teams are starting to leverage generative AI to integrate quantitative and qualitative data as well as generate analysis and insights through a chat interface. This allows the users to search the data for custom and personalized insights that are most important to them versus a printed report or standard dashboard. These approaches are proving to be more efficient and enable new insights that might not surface through traditional reporting.
During the next 12 to 18 months, the most significant opportunity lies in our ability to enable and empower our employees to use this technology to fundamentally reset the way they have historically done their jobs. Just think what it would look like if AI enabled all 120,000-plus employees to achieve a few hours of productivity gains each week or to find new talents.
There is little doubt that artificial intelligence is here to stay and is potentially the most disruptive technology of our lifetime. Our ability to leverage it to transform us individually and collectively as Koch Industries will be grounded in our ability to create virtuous cycles of mutual benefit through the union of human judgment and machine intelligence.
