What the rise of AI in leadership means for the future of work
The late Stephen Hawking wrote: “The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence.” He urged business leaders to pursue AI with purpose and prudence but to embrace the coming changes.
We’re entering an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a serious proposition at an executive leadership level, preparing us for a future where humans and machines can work together, cooperatively and harmoniously. It is too early to know the precise impact AI leadership will have on organizations. But, in essence, AI has the capacity to augment human decision-making, bringing to the boardroom more complex problem-solving and impartial data analysis than would otherwise be possible, while continuing to value human creativity and innovation.
The business world today is already immersed in AI, and in many scenarios it has opened the doors to new and more accurate ways of working. It isn’t too much of a leap to envision AI being explored in a leadership context. I have been discussing this theme a lot lately, most recently at a panel held at Pearson’s which looked at how CEOs and company chairmen worked together. I mentioned that in some of the territories I work with, we are starting to see AI and robotics augment or be integrated into the board, and while the initial reaction was that this seemed unlikely in the UK, I then ran into the very same panelists at the McKinsey Blink event later in the week, still discussing the ramifications of my question. At Citrix, we have even begun to define legal robotic rights in some of our contracts.
A recent Infosys study, Leadership in the Age of AI, found that for 45 percent of organizations globally, their AI deployments are already greatly outpacing the accuracy and productivity of comparable human activity. A PwC report also found that 62 percent of executives anticipate predictive analytics will augment their business decisions, leading to greater efficacy in the years to come. Although such change brings inevitable concerns for leaders, it is important to focus on the possibilities, and understand how AI might be used to empower human decision-making in the future.
One of my customers at Citrix Northern Europe is Scandinavian tech firm Tieto, which became the first European company to appoint an AI bot to the leadership team of a new data-driven business unit. Called Alicia T., the bot can participate in team meetings and has the authority to vote on business decisions.
“I am confident that Alicia T. will help us in finding information and making data-based decisions that humans don’t necessarily think of — and thus perhaps create something yet unforeseen,” said Ari Järvelä, head of Tieto’s Data-Driven Businesses, in an interview.
While this might seem premature to some, Tieto isn’t the only business experimenting with bots in leadership. In 2014, Hong Kong-based life sciences fund Deep Knowledge Ventures appointed a computer algorithm to its board of directors, giving the program a vote on the start-ups to invest in. In Japan, ad agency McCann appointed a logic-based system named AI-CD ß as creative director and gave it real client accounts and campaigns to lead.
