Will AI Take Away My Officers Critical Thinking Skills?

The Problem

If you've considered implementing AI at your probation agency you've probably asked yourself this question. "Will my officers lose critical thinking skills?"

You see the efficiency gains that AI offers but you're concerned the cost isn't just financial, it's worse outcomes.

You'd be right to express this concern.

Your mission is to keep communities safe while improving the outcomes of the individuals you supervise. Your job isn't about efficiency. It's about impact.

But, the reality is, efficiency is more important than ever. You have bigger caseloads, more documentation, more judges, but no budget to grow your staff.

You're being asked to do the impossible, "do more with less".

Naturally, the only solution you can find is AI. The problem is you care about outcomes and the last thing you want is for them to get worse. So, you must be careful about how you implement it.

Tasks vs Jobs

For the last few years, you've been told something along the lines of, "AI is going to do your job for you". In some sense, that's great! You have growing caseloads but shrinking staff. So, you need something to help get the job done.

But you're concerned because AI doing the job means people aren't doing the job. And if your officers just sit back while AI does their job for them, they'll lose key skills which we know are crucial in improving outcomes (something AI won't do alone).

It's not always about the raw data. Sometimes an officer needs to use their critical thinking abilities to assess a situation and make a judgement call.

AI won't do that. So we can't risk officers losing critical skills by removing them from day-to-day work.

I have a different perspective for you though. I don't believe AI should be doing an officer's job. I believe it should be helping them with tasks.

What's a Task?

AI is great at doing tasks. Tasks, in my definition, are the individual pieces of work that are required to produce a deliverable. If you've ever built a case plan, think of these as the "tools/techniques".

Some examples of this are: writing case notes, creating a field visit itinerary, reviewing an interlock report, or building a PSI.

What's the goal of a case note? To remember what important things officers talked about with their clients and have it on the record.

That's important! But remembering things and having them on the record is not the goal. They are important things required to achieve the goal, but they are not the goal.

To drive the point home, your officers' goal is not to review another interlock report! The goal is to find potential violations that would merit some response from an officer.

What's the Job?

Jobs do not equal tasks. Officers have countless tasks! But they have one job. The job is to protect your community and improve the outcomes of the individuals you supervise. Using our case plan analogy, the job is like a "goal". Where do we want to end up?

Tasks are required to help you get there. But simply completing them does not make you achieve the goal.

Here's a real world example.

Last week I was working with a CSO (Community Supervision Officer) in Texas. This officer received a 180-page interlock report. 180 pages! She had to manually review the entire thing. Guess how long that took? If you guessed 4 hours, you'd be correct.

Don't get me wrong, this task was important! Especially because she found 2 violations that resulted in a MTR. That's mission critical.

But let's imagine the report was just 1 page, told the officer that the client had 2 violations, and told the officer exactly what they were. Does it really matter that the officer didn't read the entire 180-page report if the information she receives is correct?

The goal here is to determine if the officer needed to respond to a violation. The task was reviewing all 180 pages to find those violations.

What you care about is that the officer knows how to respond to that violation. How does she address it with the client? Can she explore thinking errors with them? Does she know how to escalate?

That is what we refer to as critical thinking. We care that the officer knows what to do about the problem and why it matters. We don't care that the officer can read a report for 4 hours. We want to maximize outcomes, not effort.

If you can equip your officers with AI tools that help accelerate tasks, you can do just that.

Give officers more time to think critically about how to improve outcomes rather than spend time reviewing reports.

Again, these tasks are important. An officer should be able to review something like an interlock report and know what to look for. But do they really need to be reviewing reports for hours every week to maintain that skill? I don't think so.

How to Properly Implement AI in Probation

The goal of implementing AI should be to allow officers to spend more time on critical thinking rather than basic documentation and research tasks.

What if that officer above could've spent 4 hours figuring out how to work through the situation with her client rather than 4 hours finding the violation?

I don't know about you, but I'm nearly 100% confident that this exact thing would help improve outcomes.

That's the mental model you want to use for implementing AI in your agency.

More specifically: Where can you accelerate tasks to get an officer the information they need to make a decision and respond to a need faster?

If you're interested in what a list of those use cases are check out this blog post from a few weeks back about practical application for AI in probation.

Recap

As a leader, you want to give your probation officers the tools they need to be successful.

That means balancing efficiency gains with giving your officers more opportunities to grow and use their critical thinking skills.

This is not only possible with AI, but the best use of it.

At CaseBase we believe AI should be used to help officers improve outcomes, not just to save officers' time. That's why we've designed the most robust AI assistant for probation agencies that exists today.

CaseBase saves officers an average of 7 hours per week while giving them deeper insights into the risk, needs, and responsivity factors of their caseload.

Instead of writing and reviewing documents all week, officers using CaseBase are spending more time understanding their clients and thinking through critical decisions that will impact their clients' futures.

If you'd like to learn more about CaseBase you can schedule a demo with us or send me an email at tyler@casebase.co.