How Are You Managing the Rise of AI?

Artificial intelligence has huge potential to help make better decisions, and business leaders have the responsibility to learn how to use it in a way that empowers people, not threatens them.

Currently, leadership is all dealing with people, while artificial intelligence is entirely machine-related. But the borders are becoming fuzzy. Company leaders have to anticipate how this shift is impacting business management. Below are a few considerations for leaders looking to manage people with the rise of AI in their organizations.

How is AI Impacting Your Work?

AI Must Be Understood

AI can mean different things to different people, and because of that, it is important of company leaders to understand what AI means within the context of their operations.

Using good data, typical AI applications can perform a single task in a single channel with superhuman speed and precision. In the coming decades, “broader” AI applications will have cross-channel learning ability and reasoning. These applications are expected to be extremely disruptive and are just decades away.

It is important to be cognizant of the rising tide of AI. Company leaders who ignore the growth of this technology do so at their own risk.

AI Can Lead You to the Wrong Conclusions

Company leaders should be aware that the use of AI could result in making false conclusions. To reduce risks, company leaders ought to know and use the scientific method in their approach to AI, conducting randomized, A/B trials before drawing concrete conclusions.

AI Shouldn’t Be Depended Upon to Drive Growth

Experts say AI works well when it comes to driving productivity, but not when it comes to long-term progress. Over time, businesses use the same techniques, reducing or eliminating what was a competitive advantage held by early adopters.

The best companies, and by extension the best business leaders, are effective at handling various trade-offs, over long periods of time and under shareholder pressure. They are good at doing things now, but also effective at exploring possibilities for the future. AI is not good at managing these trade-offs and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. AI also isn’t effective when it comes to reconciling diverse viewpoints.

Functions like planning and budgeting could be driven by AI, but establishing a vision, getting stakeholder buy-in and motivating team members are all functions that must be handled by people.

Also, down the road, customers will probably own their personal information. In this regulatory ecosystem, the competitive advantage will be driven by the ability to gain the trust customers, not access to information or algorithms.

Educate Yourself

Company leaders have to understand AI to efficiently manage data scientists and IT managers within their organizations.

The most pertinent AI competency for leaders is the ability to know what the technology can achieve: Algorithms can identify patterns in data, they aren’t very effective at interpreting them.

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