David de Cremer is the Dunton Family Dean at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston, where he also serves as professor of business administration and technology.
Below, David shares five key insights from his new book. AI-savvy leaders: 9 ways to take back control and put AI to workListen to the audio version read by David himself on the Next Big Idea app.
1. Companies want AI, but business leaders aren’t on board.
We can all agree that AI will have a huge impact on business and will affect everyone. In fact, the biggest risk to organizations today is do not have Yet despite this sense of urgency, many business leaders are not yet committed to adopting AI and turning the technology into value creators.
Every time an AI implementation project fails, we hear: Where were the business leaders in this AI implementation project? Well, they never fully understood what this “new hire – AI” could do, and when they needed answers they turned to technologists instead of business-minded executives. Leaders are pushing themselves aside.
Of course, they face a challenge: the dual mission of adapting and at the same time understanding the very phenomenon they are adapting to. This requires aligning the company's objectives with its understanding of AI. If they fail to bridge this gap, their AI projects may miss the mark.
2. Business leaders need to be AI savvy.
Business leaders launch AI implementation projects are led by technologists who don't know much about this thing that supposedly creates future value, but because tech experts are not business experts, their recommendations are not necessarily the right ones for the business to implement.
Leaders need to first ask the business question they want answered and then see if they have the right data to answer that question. Can not Delegate responsibility for your AI adoption strategy: To save your organization from failing AI adoption projects, you need to include your leaders in the conversation about AI, which means they need to know enough about AI to guide its integration and address employee concerns.
“Business Leader Can not Delegate responsibility for your AI adoption strategy.”
This leadership is not about becoming expert coders, but about understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI and cultivating a culture where human-AI collaboration is seen as an enhancing tool, not a replacement. This involves learning about AI on two levels: first, learning the basics about what AI is and what it is not; and second, thinking about what AI is in a business context so you can debate with technical experts about what type of AI is best.
3. Successful AI adoption requires leadership that puts humans first and AI second.
If AI adoption is primarily AI-centric, machine first and human second, organizations will lose touch with their employees and ultimately see little to no return on their technology investments. Business leaders need to create value with a human-centric focus. Any change typically meets resistance, but this is especially true with AI, which is often portrayed as the new employee coming to take your job.
Leaders need to get everyone on board so that AI adoption is an inclusive act. Leaders who are enthusiastic about AI adoption need to drive the cultural change required to get their teams on board. To develop a human-centric approach, leaders need to ensure that humans do not feel treated like robots or expected to think like computers. Therefore, leaders need to adopt an approach that recognizes and appreciates the value that employees bring to the table by working well. and AI. Humans are critical to AI performance and deserve proper recognition.
4. Be prepared to develop your leadership skills for the AI era.
Leadership behaviors considered important in the past remain important today. The key difference is that visionary, compassionate, and transformational leaders must be in synergy with AI. In other words, today's leaders must create the right conditions for themselves and others to work with AI to create business value.
What are those conditions? As an AI-savvy leader, your goal is to enable a more efficient organization that uses AI effectively. It is still an organization run and staffed by humans, and it is humans who decide whether AI is used effectively and productively.
“As an AI-savvy leader, your goal is to enable a more efficient organization that leverages AI effectively.”
To empower your workforce, you need to be a good communicator. Business leaders need to understand both AI and humans so they can leverage a story that connects technology and business experts. This story allows visionary leaders to make AI adoption meaningful to everyone in the organization. In doing so, leaders enable collaboration across disciplines. Leaders break down silos by facilitating cooperation between technology and non-technology teams. Similarly, leaders build trust and create space to experiment with AI and provide feedback that evaluates the value AI brings to the organization.
5. Leaders will deploy AI to augment human intelligence.
We need to dispel the myth that AI is a job-disposal threat: instead, creating value from AI adoption relies on human-AI collaboration, where AI's data-crunching capabilities augment human expertise and intuition.
Unfortunately, the idea that AI is an increasingly cheaper way to replace humans and take productivity and efficiency to new levels still dominates many organizations. This is a symptom of outdated 19th and 20th century business thinking, where only revenue and efficiency matter. However, the way value is created is when humans and AI work together. The future is augmented, where AI serves human intelligence.
AI as an augmentation strategy certainly not only drives efficiency but also increases overall value. Using AI in an augmentative way cannot be seen as a one-dimensional strategy to drive people efficiency and productivity. Humans are not one-dimensional, rational task completers. They get pleasure from other sources and perform best when their work is intrinsically motivating and meaningful, not just maximally productive. Therefore, the most effective and useful business leaders are those who understand and can harness the secrets of human nature.
To listen to the audio version read by author David De Cremer, download the Next Big Idea app now.
