Julie Devol, HBR
Welcome to HBR Quick Take. I’m Julie Devoll, Editor of Special Projects and Webinars at HBR. I’m with Mike Bechtel today. As Deloitte’s chief futurist, Bechtel helps clients develop strategies to thrive in the face of discontinuity and disruption. His team researches the novel and exponential technologies most likely to impact the future of business. Today, I’ll take a brief look at AI and what it means for the future of your business. Mike, thank you for joining us today.
Mike Bechtel, Deloitte Consulting LLP
oh thank you so much for having me Being with you is an absolute pleasure.
Julie Devol, HBR
Mike, AI isn’t exactly new. It’s been around for years. But as Deloitte’s chief futurist, he sees AI changing in ways that may not be visible to all of us. Can you talk about what you think will happen next on the AI frontier?
Mike Bechtel, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Absolutely Julie. We geeks like to say that AI is something computers can’t do yet. And until recently, AI and machine learning have emerged as critics. So it was kind of like a nasty character telling me what I should have done or how I should have done it. These days, it looks like a co-pilot, quietly taking control and helping you get the results you want faster. It’s a meaningful co-pilot transition.
Now, this only works if you have trust, right? If you can’t understand or audit what is, you’re unlikely to use it. Difference #2 is a glass box instead of a black box. Explainable AI is a meaningful and trustworthy inorganic colleague.
Julie Devol, HBR
It’s really interesting to think about the future. Thank you. What do you think will be the most important thing for executives in the next few years to give them a little more boost?
Mike Bechtel, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Julie, we talked about how AI went from being a nasty critic to being a helpful co-pilot. But the next big thing, the next rabbit, is generative AI, the idea of computational creativity. Now, for those of us who are leaders in business, it feels like sheer magic. It’s a machine that does prose, poetry, and painting. But for machines, it’s just math, right? In short, the question before us as business leaders is what can we do now that we have the tools to enable digital creativity? .
There is an old adage that “success is having better problems to solve”. And so is AI. AI allows us to move up the stack and focus on higher problems.Responsibilities of business leaders [is,] What are these higher order problems? What new solutions can you offer with this surplus capacity?
Julie Devol, HBR
Mike, when it comes to AI, different companies are doing different levels of work. What should executives consider as they continue their AI journey, no matter which path they take?
Mike Bechtel, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Well, I think one of the main things that business leaders are aware of, and probably one of the most important, is that gaining this trust requires jumping over implicit and explicit biases. This means that it must be reliably excluded from ? Think of it this way. We need to teach our digital children well. To do that, we need to train them on data that represents how they want to behave, not how they have behaved in the last 100 years.
Be mindful of identifying biases and pre-existing training data, counteracting them, and making sure again that we are teaching these machines to operate on our ambitions and highest ambitions. Together we create the future we all want.
Julie Devol, HBR
Great insight into customer journeys. Mike, thank you for taking the time to talk about the future of AI today.
Mike Bechtel, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Julie, it’s an honor to be with you. thank you.
For more information, click here to read Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2023 report.
