Q It’s an honour to have you with us again, Professor! We hear congratulations are in order for your upcoming book launch. Can we start with a few words on what inspired you to write a book all about AI leadership?
A Thank you for asking. Yes, on 18 June 2024, my new book The AI-savvy leader: 9 ways to take back control and make AI work, published by Harvard Business Review Press, will be available. And there is an important reason why I wanted to write this book. As we all know, AI is all around. In fact, AI has become so mainstream that the biggest risk for organisations today is not using it. But, despite this sense of urgency, I do notice that business leaders are not actively involved in adopting AI and turning the technology into a real value creator for the company and their stakeholders. In a similar vein, participants in my executive leadership classes say that, because they’re not tech experts, they are afraid of becoming redundant. These observations led me to conclude that, in the business world, a trend has emerged where they have started valuing AI’s computational prowess over human understanding. They’re letting it lead. That is, business leaders launch AI adoption projects, but they let technologists take the lead because they don’t know much about this thing that they’re being told is the future value creator.
However, what is striking in this story is that, in delegating the company’s AI journey to AI experts because of a belief that I have called the “tech-driving-tech” strategy, something is clearly amiss. Indeed, despite AI’s being portrayed as the holy grail for business, at the same time AI adoption efforts are failing at alarming rates. So many companies I spoke with and have worked with are sinking significant money into AI, but they’re failing to extract value commensurate with the investment. The reason that I see is that prizing a technical mindset above all else for the rollout of AI adoption and implementation programmes means that companies hand off the entire process to tech experts, with disastrous results as the human element is ignored. In my view, this approach is a mistake. I’ve written this new book to correct it. I hope to reverse the trends I see in the companies I’ve worked with, the data I’ve reviewed, and the leaders I’ve spoken with. I want to bring leaders back into the AI conversation and, in doing so, I hope to save many organisations a failed AI adoption project or two by reminding them that leadership skills are absolutely essential when AI is deployed.
I want to bring leaders back into the AI conversation and, in doing so, I hope to save many organisations a failed AI adoption project or two by reminding them that leadership skills are absolutely essential when AI is deployed.
Q Your research often focuses on behavioural economics and human decision-making. How did these insights inform your perspective on the interaction between human leaders and AI systems within organisations?
What is important to know is that the book is not about the technology itself. Of course, I do dive into what AI is and how it works, but the focus is on how we will work with it and how to use it to create value for our companies. This a behavioural focus and one that is needed if we want to address the question of whether the introduction of AI
