As CEO, What Are You Doing with AI? If Nothing…Your Fate is Cast!

A recent article in the WSJ on the knowledge base of CEOs and executives on Artificial Intelligence should have been a blistering wake-up call for small business. It hasn’t been to date.

Follow this with our own survey of small business executives, where over 80% realized AI was important, but did not know where to go to learn about it!

As artificial intelligence adoption surges in large Fortune businesses, their employees are left wondering how long it will be before their jobs are eliminated from the organizations.?

In larger businesses, we find this is most prevalent within the departments themselves, where Subject Matter Experts (SME) are finding their “subjects” are growing smaller because AI Agents and AI Assistants are becoming more commonplace and there is less need for SMEs.

A recent study by Gartner about the five main concerns workers have over AI shows a genuine fear that employees have in losing their jobs. The IDC, International Data Corp., announced its future predictions saying that by 2027, 40% of current job roles will be eliminated.

What this tells me is that hard skill competencies for leaders become significantly more important than soft skills. For example, by implementing AI beyond the no-code bot level changes the workloads and work flows of every company, within every department, and this means that hard skill competencies of transforming and reforming a company’s infrastructure become even more important to master.

This could also change your company’s business model.

Our analysis of small businesses becomes even more critical, because small business changes always lag the moves of large businesses by 3-5 years for implementing a new technology.?

Gosh, I still see SMB companies without a formal ERP system, and still using home-made applications using Excel and Pivot Tables as their tools of choice. So how long will it take for small business to implement AI applications? IDC says you won’t see AI funding for small business to begin before 2026, much because of the softness in the economy today.

As a CEO or executive, if you’re going to wait 2 years before considering a move into AI, “your fate is cast,” because you’re risking the loss of key personnel to companies who are upskilling their departments into AI direct reports now.

Pay attention to our new Upskilling programs for your company.

Suivez-Moi!

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