How Human Skills Surpass AI in 3 Critical Business Scenarios

 

 

By Natalia Tkachenko-Horbachevska, an EO Ukraine member who is the cofounder and CEO of Task Force language services. With offices in Poland, Ukraine and the U.S., Natalia and her team experiment often with language AI but still insist that humans shall remain in the center of technology to take responsibility, make decisions, and foster innovation.

Everyone is talking about how AI is positioned to take over parts of human jobs, especially in content-related industries, which is raising concerns across many sectors. You’ve probably seen the memes that joke, “Hey ChatGPT, if you’re so mighty, do my laundry!”

Indeed, this next-level technological progress was meant to simplify our complex lives. We would expect AI to handle our chores and leave us with extra time to be happy and creative. Instead, ChatGPT and its analogues are trying to be creative, while humans are still doing their own laundry. Life isn’t fair!

As co-owner of a company that provides language and content services, I have several key concerns about AI and three strong use cases where humans are still essential to your business, and cannot be replaced by AI—at least, not yet.

Let’s dive in.

4 Potential Pitfalls When Using AI in Business

Cost-Efficiency and Business Scale

Consider the financial and logistical aspects of a business plan that suggests replacing humans with AI. For instance, buying and customizing new systems for in-house use can be very costly, especially if AI is tasked with overseeing AI-generated or translated content. Such systems are not only expensive but also time-consuming to implement. Are you prepared to spend another year deploying yet another complex system where AI will control AI with unpredictable results? 

Investing heavily in language AI could pay off if you operate in numerous languages with a global reach, where savings can be achieved at scale. For smaller language sets or markets, however, replacing effective human processes with costly and unpredictable AI solutions may not be worthwhile.

Sustainability and Energy Consumption

AI tools consume substantial energy. Google, for instance, operates a subsidiary, Google Energy LLC, dedicated solely to buying and selling electricity to power its data centers. Using human professionals is often more economical, particularly for content creation and translation. Replacing humans with AI systems may also still require human oversight, as someone needs to manage the technology and ensure smooth functioning. 

Confidentiality

Information processed by AI tools often goes to open servers, so be careful when sharing sensitive data. If your employees use tools like ChatGPT to write emails or proposals, make sure they remove company names, client names, and sensitive details like pricing. Sending sensitive data to AI tools is like sending it to a newspaper for publication. If the information became publicly available tomorrow, would that be acceptable for you and your business?

Hallucinations

Many AI tools are designed to be “creative,” which means they can generate unexpected or “hallucinated” content that you didn’t ask for. Imagine reviewing 100 pages and finding a random paragraph about mushrooms in the middle of a university application essay. That would be weird, to say the least. Hallucination-prone AI tools require human oversight to ensure content accuracy.

3 Scenarios Where Humans are Indispensable

With these concerns around AI in mind, there are still at least three places where human skills represent the gold standard for your business and its content:

1. Human Check of AI-Generated or Machine-Translated Content

Do you have large volumes of low-value content that you plan to process with AI and then use “as is”? It’s preferable to have it checked by a human first. And this is important: A check does not equal a proofread. The check happens faster and costs less. After a human check, the client receives a report advising them on how to proceed with the content—whether it’s acceptable as is or requires further review and proofreading.

2. Human Proofreading After Machines and AI 

While machine translation quality has improved, certain fields—such as legal, medical, and creative texts—require meticulous human review or even rewriting. Handling court cases or large sets of medical or pharmaceutical documentation without human verification is risky and can lead to serious consequences.

3. Contextual and Cultural Adaptation

One current limitation of AI is its lack of true understanding around context and cultural nuances. When translating or creating content for different regions or demographics, humans bring essential insights into cultural subtleties and context-specific language that AI often overlooks. This is particularly vital in fields like marketing, where tone and style must resonate deeply with the target audience.