The CEO's Guide to the Coming Revolution in Tech

Some major events in business slip by unnoticed at first, with their significance only sinking in years later. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 was the rare event whose importance everyone spotted immediately. Within hours of its debut, users started experimenting. Within days, companies understood that generative AI has the potential to bring competitive advantage and creative destruction to virtually every industry.

For CEOs, the priority is not to immerse themselves in the technology. Rather, it’s to determine how generative AI will impact their organizations and their industries and then make the right choices to exploit opportunities and manage challenges. In other words, they need to develop a generative AI strategy, owned by the C-suite.

This strategy should be built on three pillars: potential, people, and policies.

Potential: Discover Your Strategic Advantage

AI has never been so accessible. Low-code or no-code solutions allow anyone to create websites, generate advertising strategies, produce videos, and synthesize complex documents—the possibilities are limitless. Yet because the technology is so accessible, everyone—including the competition—can capitalize on it, and companies will struggle to differentiate themselves.

The key for CEOs is to identify a company’s “golden” use cases—those that bring true competitive advantage and create the largest impact. From that starting point, CEOs can work with their technology teams to decide whether to fine-tune existing models or to train a custom model. The generative AI decision tree, below, can help.

People: Prepare Your Workforce

In the near term, CEOs need to work with HR leaders to determine how generative AI will impact the workforce.

• Redefine roles and reassure employees. Generative AI will augment many employees’ effectiveness by increasing productivity, performance, and creativity. But it might also make those employees feel replaceable. As roles evolve, the company should conduct regular pulse checks to track employee sentiment and reassure the workforce that humans aren’t going anywhere—and in fact are needed to deploy AI effectively and ethically.
• Adjust your operating model. For most companies, the right operating model for AI will be a centralized IT and R&D department, with expert technical teams that can be deployed to business units to train or customize models as needed. Critically, data should be centralized as well, rather than fragmented in silos, so that employees who work with similar types of data have access to the same data sets.

Policies: Protect Your Business

Along with massive opportunities, generative AI presents new risks. Its outputs can be factually wrong, expose proprietary or sensitive data, or violate intellectual property protections. One study found that 40% of code generated by AI is not secure, creating new cyber vulnerabilities. For these reasons, companies need to put the right policies in place.

• Prepare for risk. Clear oversight and guardrails are needed for everything a company does that involves generative AI. Experimentation is important, but even experiments need to be tracked and monitored across the organization. Employees should be trained to only use generative AI applications in their established field of expertise. More broadly, all users need to retain a healthy skepticism of AI-generated content.
• Assess the impact of AI-generated content before it’s published. Most companies already have publication guidelines for the content they put out into the world. Those should be adapted through a formal, documented process to incorporate generative AI content and code. A review board can also consider the impact of AI-generated content (similar to the processes for publishing scientific research), including the protection of sensitive data.

Generative AI is an incredibly powerful tool, and like all tools, it requires a strategic approach for a company to use it most effectively. By focusing on the three Ps—potential, people, and policies—CEOs can use generative AI to create a long-term advantage without exposing the company to undue risks.

More of Our Top Reads on Generative AI:

1. The CEO’s Guide to the Generative AI Revolution
2. How to Put Generative AI to Work—Responsibly
3. Winning the Generative AI Revolution Video Series
4. Me, Myself, and AI Podcast: Out of the Lab and Into a Product with Microsoft’s Eric Boyd
5. How CEOs Can Evaluate New Generative AI Models

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