Fri­day, the 31st of Jan­u­ary, marked the end of the very last ex­ten­sion giv­en to busi­ness own­ers to reg­u­larise their com­pa­nies by fil­ing their an­nu­al re­turns and oth­er doc­u­ments due or face the con­se­quences set in law.

The long line formed out­side the Min­istry of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Le­gal Af­fairs on the day by those try­ing to meet the dead­line was in­dica­tive of many of the chal­lenges we face—and the ar­du­ous jour­ney ahead we have if we are to mod­ernise the way we work and make the most of the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion the world is go­ing through.

First, it is lam­en­ta­ble to see so many busi­ness­es be­hind their le­gal oblig­a­tions and sort­ing things out at the very last minute, de­spite pre­vi­ous dead­lines be­ing set. If they can’t keep up with the ba­sics of run­ning a com­pa­ny, it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine them run­ning their op­er­a­tions with the right lev­el of ef­fi­cien­cy.

Then there is the way our pub­lic sec­tor op­er­ates. In this news­pa­per’s re­port on the Jan­u­ary 31 scram­ble to get the pa­per­work in or­der, the re­porter quotes of­fi­cials as say­ing that min­istry staff worked hard to help those in line, with some of­fi­cials con­tin­u­ing to work ‘even af­ter 4 pm’, when the de­part­ment closed.

In­deed, 4 pm. This is not a ty­po. Where­as the rest of T&T’s work­ing world seems to op­er­ate un­til much lat­er, it is quite dif­fi­cult to see how our pub­lic ser­vice can do what it needs to do shut­ting shop at 4 pm.

But per­haps the most wor­ry­ing thing about this sto­ry is the fact that the lines were there in the first place. Most mod­ern or even mod­est­ly mod­ern economies will have their equiv­a­lent of the Com­pa­nies Reg­is­ter al­ready ful­ly on­line, with busi­ness­es able to up­load all rel­e­vant doc­u­ments—from own­er­ship in­for­ma­tion to an­nu­al ac­counts—from the com­fort of their of­fices and at any time of the day.

These doc­u­ments, if de­signed to be pub­lic, should al­so be eas­i­ly ac­cessed by the pub­lic, in­clud­ing ba­sic in­for­ma­tion on the com­pa­ny’s own­er­ship, a list of di­rec­tors, whether it is com­pli­ant with its le­gal oblig­a­tions, and the lat­est ac­counts filed with the or­gan­i­sa­tion. None of this is rock­et sci­ence, and it can make work eas­i­er for com­pa­nies (thus help­ing im­prove pro­duc­tiv­i­ty) while al­so mak­ing the rel­e­vant gov­ern­ment de­part­ment more ef­fi­cient.

As stat­ed here many times be­fore, we have a long way to go be­fore we can say T&T’s Gov­ern­ment is ful­ly dig­i­tal and mak­ing the most of the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains that can bring with it. But, ac­cord­ing to a re­cent re­port by McK­in­sey, the glob­al con­sul­tan­cy gi­ant, busi­ness­es al­so have some way to go to make the most of new tech­nolo­gies, es­pe­cial­ly AI.

A re­cent re­port ar­gues that the ar­rival of AI in the work­place has the po­ten­tial to see a trans­for­ma­tion on par with when the steam en­gine led to the In­dus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Based on cor­po­rate case stud­ies in the US, McK­in­sey be­lieves that long-term AI op­por­tu­ni­ties can gen­er­ate USD 4.4 tril­lion in pro­duc­tive growth alone. That is a lot of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

But, at the same time, it says that, whilst 92 per cent of the com­pa­nies sur­veyed stat­ed they are in­vest­ing in AI, on­ly one per cent of their lead­ers de­scribed their com­pa­nies as ‘ma­ture’ when it came to how they are de­ploy­ing AI in the work­place.

This is wor­ry­ing, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the speed at which AI is im­prov­ing—any­one dab­bling with Gen AI tools like Ope­nAI, Gem­i­ni, Au­topi­lot, or Claude over the past few months and years will have no­ticed how far their ca­pa­bil­i­ties have al­ready rad­i­cal­ly im­proved in a rel­a­tive­ly short pe­ri­od of time.

There is al­so an­oth­er im­per­a­tive for busi­ness lead­ers to bet­ter un­der­stand AI and cre­ate the right ap­proach to its use in the work­place: their staff are ahead of them.

Ac­cord­ing to the McK­in­sey sur­vey of US se­nior lead­ers and em­ploy­ees, staff were three times more like­ly to be al­ready us­ing AI tools than the ex­ec­u­tives in their com­pa­nies. The same US em­ploy­ee sur­vey al­so es­tab­lished that they were like­ly to em­brace AI even more if their em­ploy­ers act­ed to sup­port them on the jour­ney, with for­mal Gen AI train­ing top­ping the wish list, fol­lowed by bet­ter, seam­less in­te­gra­tion of the tools in­to their work­flows.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, while the em­ploy­ees sur­veyed ac­cept that there are risks and that AI may even re­place a size­able el­e­ment of their own work (thus putting jobs at risk), they al­so seemed to show a high lev­el of trust in their em­ploy­ers to in­tro­duce AI in an eth­i­cal and safe way.

The out­comes of the sur­vey are broad­ly pos­i­tive as far as the use of AI in the work­place is con­cerned, whilst throw­ing many chal­lenges to busi­ness lead­ers, as well as na­tion­al gov­ern­ments through­out the world. In the case of gov­ern­ments, first due to their role as em­ploy­ers and re­spon­si­ble for many crit­i­cal ser­vices, but al­so due to the need for coun­tries to find the right reg­u­la­to­ry bal­ance to al­low the tech­nol­o­gy to be as im­pact­ful as pos­si­ble whilst al­so en­sur­ing fun­da­men­tal rights and pro­tec­tions are in place on be­half of the cit­i­zen.

For busi­ness own­ers, it is about look­ing at AI to im­prove what they do and of­fer, to stream­line ser­vices, and to, yes, re­duce costs but with­out cut­ting cor­ners or act­ing in ways that are legal­ly and moral­ly ques­tion­able.

Above all, good and re­spon­si­ble busi­ness­es are look­ing at AI as a pos­i­tive tool first, with job loss­es (if any) com­ing sec­ond, not the oth­er way around. In many parts of the world, the idea of peo­ple queue­ing up in front of gov­ern­ment of­fices to get pa­pers filed doesn’t even cross their minds any­more, even be­fore AI ar­rived with a bang. Hope­ful­ly, we will join those lucky cit­i­zens soon, but for that to hap­pen, we must do more than just make progress, we will need to leap for­ward in­stead.