How are executives thinking about the impact of AI on their people and businesses?
The Debrief: Perspectives on leadership and transformation
Issue 2
Artificial intelligence is no longer the sci-fi fantasy it once was. With AI revenue predicted to increase to $37 billion by 2025 worldwide, the idea of machines carrying out work in a “smart way” is becoming more real as we speak.
At SYPartners, we help leaders imagine and build new futures. Our work in AI is usually part of a larger transformation effort, and focuses on how emerging technologies can help an executive team widen their aperture for what’s possible for their offerings or culture.
This month we asked SYPartners leaders: How are executives thinking about the impact of AI on the future of their people and businesses?
Here are five themes that surfaced:
Despite the hype, AI isn’t a panacea.
81% of Fortune 500 CEOs report artificial intelligence and machine learning to be very important to their businesses.
But when you work side-by-side with those leaders, as SYPartners does, you realize that many are still shaping their understanding of AI and how to activate it.
As Joshua-Michéle Ross points out: “AI doesn’t have a clear definition for a lot of CEOs yet. It’s still a really broad category — just as ‘digital’ is.”
Josh recalls a strategic prioritization meeting with the leadership team of a large retail group he’s consulting to: “Among a multitude of forces, the team identified AI immediately as being central to their strategy going forward. But how they might act on it is still nebulous.”
Tom Andrews adds, “For CEOs in retail particularly, who are contending with market forces just to stay afloat, AI won’t be the first thing they’re acting on.”
In the meantime, Josh reminds leaders how they might inventively leverage the human capability in their workforce to get smart on something — if AI is not yet attainable. For example:
“If you’re looking for deeper customer insight, when might it be valuable to engage with customers through ethnography vs. data-mine them in bulk? Or how might you activate 60,000 employees to interact with customers in more profound ways?”
But (eventually) AI will be part of everything.
“AI is where the future is going because the rise of technology — apps, sensors, cloud, the internet, mobile devices — has resulted in a rise of data that only AI can make sense of,” Judith Hoogenboom says.
Reflecting on her current work advising a leading global tech company, she adds: “There aren’t enough programmers to keep up, so we need apps that can learn, create their own algorithms, and adapt as people and business change.”
As Judith explains, we’re heading toward a future where all of your technology will be much more helpful. Imagine an app that enables you as a marketer to make a better ad placement on an ongoing basis. And, thanks to AI, it keeps learning.
AI will even become part of our fundamental experiences as humans, Steve Semelsberger says, referring to clients he’s advising in the consumer tech space: “They’re building new machine learning-based tools that will transform core human experiences — like how well we relate to one another and how we make life’s most important decisions.”
So if you’re an entrepreneur, or working in corporate innovation, AI should be firmly on your agenda. Just take the advice of a founding CEO (who’s built several billion-dollar businesses) who recently told Steve:
“I wouldn’t build anything today that doesn’t have a strong AI component as the backbone of the business.”
Businesses will take radical leaps forward.
The brimming value of AI is front and center for Jason Baer, who’s partnering with a CEO and executive team to build a new kind of media company — part of which is an innovation center focused on how emerging technologies can supercharge their offering.
“Our client sees AI in all its applications — machine learning, data mining, chatbots, computer vision — as ways to take non-incremental leaps forward. This requires both imagination and willingness to challenge some of the assumptions they hold about previously unquestioned parts of their business,” Jason says.
Of the many ways AI can support a company’s growth strategy, they tend to cluster into five interrelated areas: how you’re experienced by customers, how you’re experienced by employees, how you generate revenue, how you process data, and how you make your operations more efficient.
“If you’re the CEO of a company in peril and contending with macro forces such as digitization and democratization, you may need to design a new business model or corporate strategy. And AI has to be vital part of the mix,” Jason says.
“So the question I’m encouraging all leaders to think about is: Which part of your business is most ripe for reinvention — and how might AI support your strategy?”
AI will bring out the human in us: Nothing artificial about intelligence.
“The high-tech clients we’re consulting to are looking at how to enhance human abilities, not replace them,” Tom Andrews says.
“They’re asking: What is really hard for our people to do to deliver great experiences for customers, that could be easily done if we augment their intelligence with AI data mining?”
Take AI in healthcare, for example: There are 8,000 medical journal articles published every day. No human can keep up with that — but IBM’s Watson can. Not to mention, it can recognize melanoma from skin lesions and analyze the one million GB of data that a single patient generates in their lifetime, to come up with a diagnosis and set of weighted recommendations.
But then human judgement is activated. It’s the doctor who will determine the course of action given the patient’s situation — and do the artful, human-to-human work of helping the patient understand how to move forward.
As Tom suggests, “One of the questions leaders need to consider is: In a world where AI shapes a new kind of partnership between technology and people, how might we cultivate the uniquely human skills (e.g., creativity, empathy, generosity) that will be more valuable than ever?”
There’s a new place to set at the leadership table.
As with any new era of technology, AI is shaping key roles inside companies.
Let’s start with data: AI feeds on data. And it’s only as good as the food it consumes. “So while organizations used to fight for the best computer programmers,” Steve Semelsberger explains, “The hot job now is data scientist.”
Not to mention, an entirely new set of skills will be required to train, use, and develop for AI.
So perhaps every business should be hiring a VP of AI — Steve says, quoting what Stanford professor and Coursera founder Andrew Ng shared at a recent Fortune Brainstorm Tech dinner.
“About 100 years ago, corporations were hiring VPs of Electricity,” Ng said, “They played a really critical role until it became more common and understood.”
If AI is the electricity of the 21st century, what kind of seat might it have at your leadership table? And what new ways of working will your organization need to adopt?
SYPartners contributors: Tom Andrews, President Organizational Transformation; Jason Baer, Principal; Judith Hoogenboom, Senior Advisor; Joshua-Michéle Ross, Principal; Steve Semelsberger, President Individual Transformation
