*A special thank you to our colleagues – Loraine, Sharon, Lu Ann, and Jeanne – for sharing their perspectives on navigating one of the biggest workplace shifts of the last century.
While the tech may be different, we’ve been here before. We had the opportunity to sit down with four of our team members who lived (and worked) through the Information Age: where we went from paper files to PCs at every desk. We discovered that, much like today, the transition was full of skepticism, awkward adjustments, and eventually, breakthroughs.
As you can imagine, the blank Millennial stares as they reminisced about dot matrix paper, Correcting Selectrics, and 14-column workpapers really got the conversation going (for the record, we had to Google Correcting Selectrics, it was basically the original Ctrl+Z). But in all seriousness, the anxiety surrounding AI today is not a novel emotion when it comes to big shifts in tech and how they will impact us as humans.
Back in the 20th century, the workplace lived and died by paper. In our colleagues’ roles, job orders were jotted on whiteboards, employee notes coded on index cards in personnel files, severance letters penned on typewriters, and audit workpapers carried in mule cases. Computers were entering the scene, sometimes one shared machine for an entire department. And even then, not everything lived on it. HR files stayed paper for decades. Early printers were dot-matrix beasts, so loud you had to reserve a conference room just to run them, littering the floor with the perforated edges.
The learning curve was steep: without training, navigating clunky software, emerging Excel worksheets, and shared drives with no naming conventions felt impossible.
But slowly, the benefits emerged: fewer errors, faster processes, contracts and billing handled in minutes instead of days. What started with skepticism and anxiety evolved into second nature and increased productivity.
Just like the move to computers, AI will touch “literally every job”. And it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not. The only question is whether we prepare ourselves, and our organizations, to embrace it, or risk being left behind.
Leaving you with pieces of wisdom from those who have done it before:
- “You can’t avoid it, so tackle it head on.”
- “Take deep breaths and carry on. If you are scared, it’s not going to keep it from happening. Research it, use it, and make it help you.”
- “Find ways AI will make your job easier and embrace it. Then make sure the finished product is authentically you.”
- “People have a tendency to run with the negative without thinking of the ways it can be positive. There are always going to be positions that require humans.”
Until next time,
Your Spherion South Central WI & Northern IL team