The Secret to Successful AI-Driven Process Redesign
Summary.
Employee empowerment has long been a key principle of continuous improvement programs. Now that natural-language interfaces have made gen AI accessible to nontechnical employees, people throughout organizations are initiating both large and small process changes. Rather than displacing workers, gen AI is putting them in the center of machine-assisted processes that are transforming creative work, scientific discovery, physical operations, and manufacturing. You can think of this as kaizen 2.0—a movement in which employees, with the help of the latest technology, truly drive business transformation.
In the late 1940s an engineer named Taiichi Ohno began developing the Toyota Production System, basing it on the Japanese principle of kaizen, or continuous improvement. At Toyota it led to constant small enhancements, with key suggestions coming from employees at all levels in manufacturing. Rather than revolutionizing its industry through bold, innovative, and risky endeavors, Toyota chose incremental but relentless improvement. Today it’s the world’s largest automaker, and the Toyota Production System continues to be a model of how to manage processes across an enterprise. Some notable concepts that emerged with it have enjoyed a long afterlife: worker empowerment, a focus on perpetual cost reduction, total quality management, just-in-time manufacturing, root-cause analysis, data-driven processes, and automation with a human touch (jidoka).