Leaders help organizations maneuver transformational changes. Latest advances in artificial intelligence have triggered large scale changes in every industry. Interestingly, a recent Harvard Business Review articlehas predicted that “the first wave of corporate AI is doomed to fail.” The authors, Kartik Hosanagar and Apoorv Saxena, have argued that most of the companies are not approaching the AI-focused initiatives in the right way.
Undoubtedly, organizations must persist in their initiatives, experiment continuously, and learn from mistakes. However, the initiatives may still fail due to lack of preparation or simply because of not following a systematic approach. Senior leaders in every organization must rise and face this challenge by creating robust strategies that may help the company thrive in the new age of AI. Let us explore three such critical strategies that leaders must have to harness the powers of artificial intelligence.
Everyone is talking about AI. In this year’s Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2017), intelligent devices tookcenter stage. Companies are desperately trying to ride the wave of AI. Products and services are regularly getting tagged with this breakthrough technology. There is a lot of hype surrounding Machine Learning, deep learning, neural networks, and related topics.
Consequently, leaders must have a strategy to cut through the clutter and identify how their organizations can use artificial intelligence to create positive outcomes for the business and customers. While it may be too much to expect that an executive would have hands-on experience in technology, but a reasonable level of AI-literacy would be a must. Leaders should:
When asked about the factors that might be hindering progress of AI in business Eric Brynjolfsson, author and professor at MIT Sloan School, has remarked, “What’s not holding us back is the technology, what is holding us back is the imagination of business executives to use these new tools in their businesses. You know, with every general-purpose technology, whether it’s electricity or the internal combustion engine the real power comes from thinking of new ways of organizing your factory, new ways of connecting to your customers, new business models. That’s where the real value comes.”
Sooner or later, most of the organizations would acquire expertise in AI by upskilling the existing workforce or by hiring new talents. At that time, the primary differentiator would be the way one organization applies this technology to solve customers’ problems vis-à-vis another.
