Imagine a workplace where you spend less time attached to a keyboard, worrying about how to word an email or sound professional enough in an office memo. Instead, you stop hunching over a keyboard and start talking your way through written correspondence, the way you might with another person.
Such a workplace may not be as far off as you imagine, according to Calum MacDougall, president of the enterprise division at audio equipment brand Jabra. Whether office culture keeps pace is another question.
"The way that you will want to communicate with your AI agents will be increasingly in the way that you communicate with your human colleagues," he says. "Which is by voice."
Less corporate speak, more creativity
MacDougall argues that AI could make work more conversational, and that, in turn, could promote creativity. For starters, it's easier to talk than it is to type. The average person types 40 words per minute but speaks much faster, with estimates ranging between 100 and 160 words per minute. So people naturally share more context, rapidly, when communicating verbally.
There's also the question of how we formulate our thoughts. MacDougall argues that when people type, especially in a professional context, they tend to naturally self-edit. He predicts that conversational AI will encourage future workers to brainstorm and collaborate with it much as they would a colleague, rather than carefully crafting emails and documents.
There is some research to support the idea that speaking and writing lend themselves to different kinds of thinking. A literature review published by AI educator Bryan Cassady, with researchers at Cornell University, argues that speaking ideas aloud can increase both the volume and divergence of thought, particularly in early stages of development. Separate research from IBM suggested that creativity can emerge through interaction between humans and conversational AI.
But what happens to decades of workplace norms built around polished written communication?
Younger workers are already questioning some of the conventions of the modern workplace. The "corporate ick" has become shorthand for younger employees' distaste for performative professionalism — from useless jargon to office attire and the pressure to put on a buttoned-up workplace facade.
"It's just much more practical and efficient to talk to people like normal people, which we quite often don't do in business," MacDougall says. "To create a more casual, almost egalitarian way of working, which is more open — I think the technology can enable that."
Pamela Pavliscak, an adjunct assistant professor at the Pratt Institute's School of Information who studies human-computer interaction, tells Fast Company that with conversational AI, people can start with unfiltered spoken thoughts or use their own notes to talk through ideas.
"The really interesting thing that I'm seeing with voice interactions is that it can stay a little messy for a while, and sometimes the really interesting ideas come from that messiness," she says. "It makes it easier to separate brainstorming from presenting ideas formally." Since so much corporate communication is rigid and templated, "this can feel liberating," Pavliscak says.
The downside of thinking out loud
There is a paradox here, Pavliscak explains. Conversational AI might free workers from thinking in corporate-speak, only for AI to translate those messy thoughts back into something boring. "The end result will likely be smoothed out by AI into something more blandly professional," she says.
Voice-based AI may preserve some of the personality that corporate communication has encouraged workers to water down. "Voice keeps that imperfection, that human signal that is so important," Pavliscak says.
Speaking to AI introduces its own privacy concerns, including questions about the separation between the individual and the company when workers verbalize thoughts to corporate systems. "Do they then own my thoughts?" Pavliscak asks. "It feels very intimate."
If people are seen talking out loud to themselves in the workplace, it can feel a little awkward. One potential solution is technology that can detect speech as quiet as a whisper.
A multimodal workplace could give workers more flexibility and autonomy over how they work. The keyboard is unlikely to disappear overnight — or maybe ever for some people. More likely is a future where workers move between speaking, typing, and other ways of interacting with AI, depending on what they're trying to get done.
In this world, the messiness we've traditionally been encouraged to edit out of our working lives may turn out to be an asset rather than a bug.