What Leaders Must Do to Make AI Work

Christine Calhoun:

What should business leaders do to ensure that their workforce gets the most out of the AI revolution? Jared?

Jared Spataro:

Good question. I get that question just about every day. We're at a point right now where one of the most important things I think you can do is provide broad access in an economically viable type of way. We recognize that this is a technology that unlike other software isn't one that has a marginal cost of zero. It costs us to run the data centers. It costs us to actually do what we call the reasoning or the inference. So there's a cost associated with it. But there are some great options out there now for providing really broad access to very, very advanced models. So we start there.

We think that's really important. It's almost like what happened with whether it's the PC revolution or the mobile internet. Providing broad access gave people the exposure they needed to then be very innovative. That's step one. Step two is a little bit, it's a little bit more aggressive, I would say. Here you have to, as a leader, have some vision about where you want to focus your AI efforts to try and drive really measurable results. If you're going to get down the processes, you can't let that happen willy-nilly. You can't hope, you know, that bottoms up people are going to automate themselves out of a job or be incredibly innovative on their day-to-day kind of schedule. They've got jobs to do, we pay them to go do things, you know, in operating a company. So what I found over the last two and a half years is that it really isn't happening, not at scale, unless there's a leader who has some vision and kind of top down decides that there's a place that they are going to rally the leadership team and the troops in order to go get that work done. Oftentimes that involves, for instance, taking away operating expense and saying, I need you to be more efficient in this area and here's some reinvestment back into technology tools and kind of strategy to help us do that. So it's not something that happens on its own, even though the technology is incredible, it takes real leadership, real skill to realize the types of benefits that people are hoping to see.

Shishank Gupta:

I'll actually build on what Jared said. I like what he said about leadership having a vision for AI and what does it mean to the leadership. And I will rephrase that possibly in a slightly different way. Most people look at adoption of AI as a technology initiative. And I think it is not a technology initiative. It's a bigger change initiative. I think if we can understand the imperatives behind AI and what it is meant to do and the value it can impart, then I think the way we would look at implementing and extending AI benefits into the organization is very different. The moment we look at change, then we understand, we try to look at who are the stakeholders, what is the impact of the change, how we carry them along in this journey, whether it is training, enabling, understanding the concerns of the individual stakeholders and helping them through this process and easing them through the process. So as I said, it's to me, if you look at it as a change initiative and not just a technology initiative, and don't get me wrong, it is a technology initiative. But I think the bigger part is the change admin, which also means the people side, the way the business will run. We have to reimagine processes. AI is not meant to automate and do things faster what we were doing before. If we were doing inefficient things, we will do inefficient things faster. That's not the idea. The idea is to do things differently. And therefore, I think the change is an important part. Tied to that is the element of training and enablement of the teams. How do you embrace this change? People will need to unlearn and unlearn a whole lot of new things because sometimes it's not the same. The way we write prompts in AI is not the way we use a typical search engine. So it is different if you really want to really get the benefits out of it. And last but not least, it will also open up new opportunities and people need to be open to that idea of new work stream, new career streams, repurposing of existing people, hiring new people into new roles. And all of that will play in as we go along. So I do think it begins with framing it as a change initiative and then enabling the process that comes with it whether it's process change, people change, human transformation or talent change and so on and so forth.