Some leaders are focused on how AI can drive efficiencies or help their business scale, whilst others are seeing it as a cost-cutting exercise. All of which is valid, all these avenues need to be explored. Whether we like it or not, AI is going to lead to change, AI is going to replace jobs. Some companies will fall by the wayside, but others will thrive and create new job functions that we couldn’t have even imagined just 10 years ago.
There are many other angles to discuss around AI, but there's one that I don't see discussed often enough, which is what it means personally for the leaders of today.
Many businesses start with founders who are hardwired to be leaders. They have that spark that drives innovation, they know how to manage risk, they see opportunity where others do not. These founders have successfully built businesses through hard graft, the ability to think on their feet and get everyone else to buy into their vision. In other words, they have built their businesses with themselves as the foundation. They are the brain, the muscle, and the charming face of the business.
The AI awakening challenges this position, and fundamentally threatens those leaders who are not able to adapt to this new normal by accepting their new place in the organisation.
For many of these leaders, knowledge is power was the mantra they built their businesses on. But AI gives everyone in the organisation access to unprecedented amounts of information. As I say in my book, The Age of Information was really the era in which information became cheap and accessible, but you still needed the knowledge of how to access and use that information. Now we have transitioned into The Age of Intelligence and the same is true, we are now in the era where intelligence is becoming cheaper and more accessible.
Access to AI assistants turns intelligence into a commodity that can be valued in tokens within a SaaS product or energy consumption in a data centre.
This doesn't devalue your knowledge as a leader, but it shrinks the gap between you and your team and gives others in the room a louder, better-informed voice. AI is literally eroding years of experience and replacing it with easily accessible information that makes even the most junior member of your team able to create business plans, spot key patterns in complex datasets, or design omni-channel marketing campaigns.
This brings us nicely on to the second part of the equation. The younger, more tech savvy members of your team will be more likely to adopt new technology, explore its abilities, test the output, and ultimately learn when they can and can't trust the response. I've seen it with older generations already, they see a questionable AI overview in Google, or ask ChatGPT a niche, out-of-context question, and when the AI fails to come up with the right answer, they discount AI across the board, assuming it's a gimmick that isn't ready for serious use yet.
There are leaders doing the same thing, right now.
What they don't realise is that 90% of how good a response from AI is is based on how well prompted it is, how much context it has, what it thinks you want it to tell you. A poorly prompted AI assistant will be wrong most of the time. The problem is you.
You need to invest time to understand the limitations of AI, the best techniques for prompting it, and most importantly how those within your team are successfully deploying it already.
For some of you, yes. AI will spell the end for your business. Either your products or services will become redundant, or lack of AI adoption will make you less competitive. Either way, some businesses will fail.
But others will flourish. Those that can be agile, and pivot when needed will learn to work with AI.
When I run workshops for leaders about AI adoption, I focus on how we empower employees to be more effective, to delegate the boring tasks to AI and focus on the creative ones, and to use AI as a tool for positive change in the organisation.
I know that AI will replace some jobs, but I want to help responsible leaders put in place solid foundations that will enable them to not just adopt AI within their core business operations, but take the people in their organisation with them on the journey.
In the same way that the Industrial Revolution replaced jobs (and brought negative as well as positive changes with it!), it also created new ones. It meant that some tasks which previously took days, or weeks could now be done in minutes or hours. It freed people up to do other more creative things. Overall, quality of life improved, living standards went up and ultimately it was seen as a positive change.
However, in hindsight it would have been great if we could have achieved this technological progress without setting the world on the path of climate crisis. And that’s where we are right now as a society. We’re standing on the precipice of a technological change that has the potential to be the biggest change to our way of life since the Industrial Revolution.
Your role, is to put in place solid foundations and build a company that has the culture, mindset and ability to empower your employees, not replace them.
Ultimately, if we adopt AI with the sole purpose of replacing entry-level roles or to fulfill menial tasks, then we will create a workforce of middle managers whose entire role is to manage teams of AI agents. In time, the younger generations will enter the workforce only to discover that there are no entry-level jobs and that they either need to go work in industries that still need human workers, or get thrown in at the deep end in a management role where they bring no experience and haven’t had the time to master their craft.
This top-heavy workforce simply doesn’t work, which is why I advocate so strongly for the use of AI to make entry-level roles more efficient and more effective, empowering junior colleagues to learn more and cover more ground.
We have the choice then to aim for a world where we have no talented young employees rising through the ranks and instead a bunch of bored managers managing machines. Or instead, a world where we encourage our youngest and brightest to learn more, to embrace technology, and become the smartest one in the room.
This then is your new position in the business. Not to be the one with all the answers, or the loudest voice in the room, but to empower and enable others to surpass you. You cannot be the ceiling to your employee’s growth, and now AI will make it impossible to keep up with those that bring enough energy and willingness to your company. In other words, if you do anything other than empower them, they will move on and find businesses that will embrace them and the technology.
The good news is that the time to act is now. The technology is still developing, and most companies are still experimenting. What is clear is that businesses that are investing in AI, are seeing improved ROI and better results from their spend. So, if you haven’t yet embarked on your journey with AI, now is the time to start. Don’t just go out and start buying SaaS products that market themselves as being AI-powered. Start with your most important resource, your people. Empower them, harness their enthusiasm, work with them to develop a strategy that takes you all on the journey together.