5 Reasons Every CEO Needs to Get Comfortable with AI

David De Cremer is the Dunton Family Dean at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston, where he is also a professor in management and technology.

David shares five key insights from his new book, The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work:

1. Companies want AI, but business leaders fail to engage.

We all seem to agree that AI will affect business profoundly, and it will affect everyone. In fact, the biggest risk for organizations today is not using it. But, despite this sense of urgency, many business leaders are not actively involved in adopting AI and turning the technology into a value creator.

Every time an AI adoption project fails, I hear: Where were the business leaders in this AI adoption project? Well, they never fully got their heads around what this “new employee – AI” could do, and when questions needed answering, they deferred to the techies rather than business-oriented executives. Leaders are side-lining themselves.

Of course, they face a conundrum: a dual mandate to adapt and simultaneously comprehend the very phenomena to which they’re adapting. This calls for alignment between corporate purpose and AI comprehension. Failure to bridge this gap means that AI projects may miss the mark.

2. Business leaders need to be AI-savvy.

Although business leaders launch AI adoption projects, they let technologists take the lead because they don’t know much about this thing they’re being told is the future value creator. But tech experts are not business experts, so their recommendations are not necessarily the right ones for a company to act upon.

Leaders should start by asking the business questions they want answered and then see whether the right data is available to answer those questions. Business leaders cannotdelegate the responsibility of AI adoption strategy. Leaders need to be brought into the AI conversation to save organizations from failed AI adoption projects. This means that leaders must be knowledgeable enough about AI to guide its integration and address employee concerns.

This leadership is not about being expert coders but about understanding AI’s capabilities and limitations and fostering a culture where human-AI collaboration is seen as a tool for enhancement rather than a replacement. This includes learning about AI at two levels. First, learn the basics of what AI is and what it is not. Second, think about what AI is in your business context so that it can drive discussions with tech experts about what kind of AI is most suitable to use.

3. Successful AI adoption requires leadership that puts humans first and AI second.

If the adoption of AI is primarily AI-centered, where the machine comes first and humans come second, organizations lose connection with their workforce and ultimately see little or even no return on the investments they made in the technology. Business leaders need to create value by taking a human-centered focus. Any change is usually met with resistance, and this is especially the case with AI since it is often portrayed as the new employee coming after your job.

Leaders need to get everyone on board so that AI adoption is an inclusive act. Leaders keen to start deploying AI need to drive the cultural change required to get their teams on board. To develop a human-centered approach, leaders must ensure that humans do not feel treated like robots and are not expected to think like computers. Leaders, therefore, need to adopt an approach where they recognize and credit the value driven by employees working successfully with AI. Humans are crucial to the performance of AI and deserve appropriate acknowledgment.

4. Be open to developing your leadership skills in response to the AI era.

Leadership behaviors that were considered important in the past will still be important today. The main difference will be that visionary, caring, and transformational leaders need to work in synergy with AI. In other words, leaders today need to create the right conditions for them and others to work with AI to deliver business value.

What are such conditions? Your aim as an AI-savvy leader is to deliver a more efficient organization that uses AI effectively. That will still be an organization run and staffed by humans, and it will be those humans that determine whether the AI is used effectively and productively or not.

To empower your people, you need to be a great communicator. Business leaders need to understand both AI and humans so that they can use a narrative that brings tech and business experts together. This narrative allows visionary leaders to make AI adoption meaningful to everyone in the organization. In doing so, leaders are enablers of collaboration across disciplines. They break down silos by fostering cooperation between tech and non-tech teams. In a related fashion, they build trust and create room for experimenting with AI so feedback can be provided assessing the value AI can bring to the organization.

5. Leaders deploy AI to augment human intelligence.

We need to debunk the myth of AI as a job-stealing menace. Instead, creating value by means of AI adoption is all about human-plus-AI collaborations, where AI’s data-crunching abilities amplify human expertise and intuition.

Unfortunately, the idea that AI is an increasingly cheap way to replace people and achieve new levels of productivity and efficiency is still dominating many organizations. This is a symptom of outdated 19th and 20th-century business thinking: that the bottom line and efficiency are the only thing that matters. The way to create value, however, is through humans and AI working together. The future is augmentation, where AI is in service of human intelligence.

AI as an augmentation strategy is indeed not only about promoting efficiency but also about enhancing holistic value. Using AI in augmentative ways cannot be seen as a unidimensional strategy that promotes people’s efficiency and productivity. Humans are not unidimensional rational task completers. They derive pleasure from other sources, and performance will improve most if their work is intrinsically motivating and meaningful, not just maximally productive. Therefore, the most effective and useful business leaders will be those who understand and can leverage the secret sauce of humanity.

Written by:  David De Cremer, the Dunton Family Dean at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston, for the Next Big Idea Club blog.