How Leaders Should Balance the Future of AI, with the Fear of It

AI is real and it’s here. It’s been here for quite a while, actually. It helps us vacuum and turn off lamps and secure our homes. Useful stuff, but also relatively low impact. But there feels like a lot more chatter recently around how AI could or should impact critical components of business. The surge of concern, or excitement (or both), means that leaders need to strike a balance around AI. This means tempering the conversation as much as the implementation. Currently, a lot of significant AI impact on high-level human contributions is in the arts, as we saw in the actors’ and writers’ strikes in summer of 2023. However, when it comes to AI and a seismic shift in business, I think we are not as close as some think (or panic). Leaders today can lean on their own experience to both welcome the possibility of AI contributions without leaning into an unproductive frenzy around it.

How do leaders acknowledge the growing role of AI while managing the conversation around it?

I think the best comparison is something relatable for anyone who was early in their career twenty years ago: the growth of the World Wide Web. This is mostly going to be the Gen Xers. That’s particularly relevant because, as I wrote in Psychology Today, Gen X is the growing demographic among FTSE100 and Fortune 500 CEOs. So today’s leaders should rest assured that while the new technological advancement is unprecedented, they have lived through unprecedented technological change before. That’s the challenge of the pace of evolution we’re in.

As you might recall, the internet in the late 90s seemed to be a huge—and immediate–sea change in how we lived. We would buy books on Amazon, download music via Napster and get our mail from AOL. There was a rapid transition regarding the opportunity to do different things. But our opportunity to do this was much sooner than our widespread preference for it. Napster died a painful legal death long before Spotify and other streaming music actually replaced physical music media. Email did become popular for casual correspondence, but not for official business communications. And Amazon…ok, yeah.

But, on the other hand, brick-and-mortar stores continue to be present. We’ve lost Tower Records and Blockbuster, but we still have Walmart and Tesco. The way we did transactions changed, but it didn’t happen overnight. It feels like it did, sometimes: the pace of change now is undoubtedly faster than it ever was in history. But the dot coms of 2002 are mostly gone. The early iterations of search engines—remember Netscape Navigator?—are also obsolete. In other words, the surge of activity in the first days of the internet were not an immediate and inevitable obliteration of life as we knew it. We may have marvelled at the possibility, but we did not succumb to it.

Humans don’t embrace change. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

In 2006, I was in a Brussels train station walking past a coffee shop, when I saw someone on a Skype call. I was fascinated by the (then) amazing advance in technology. At the time, I thought ‘wow, that’s the future’. I was convinced that the future was really near. It wasn’t. Years later, in 2010, I spoke at a conference and leaders were still joking about Skype. They were sure it would never be a real business tool. While we began to rely on teleconferencing over the next decade, it was a slow, incremental adoption at the business level. Really, it wasn’t until the events of 2020 that tools like Zoom became our lifeblood to working and connecting with each other, personally and professionally.

My point is simply that humans resist change. We do it for all kinds of primal evolutionary reasons tied to basic survival (the path that didn’t have bears is the one we want to go down again). We also do it for less defensible reasons, when we seek safety sometimes to the exclusion of discovery. And in the case of AI, we’ll do a little bit of both. This is especially true at the corporate operational levels. We will continue to see the opportunity to use AI increase. Meanwhile our natural resistance to change will temper the pace and shape the form we eventually live with.

You need to manage the organisation to anticipate the panic, but not to buy into it.

It’s the responsibility of top management to set the culture and tone around AI. It’s—like so many things—all about balance. Don’t drink so much you’re going to get a hangover. On the other hand, don’t look the other way and miss the party entirely. Start planning for the potential of AI, but don’t overestimate its current ability to execute. For some companies that could mean appointing one strategic leader to be in charge of AI management (chief of intelligence sounds a bit lofty, but maybe…). For others, it might mean building a culture where everyone is encouraged to think about AI more broadly and promote (controlled, limited) experimentation. And also recognise when that would be a distraction.

I’ve said on several occasions that I think communication may now be the key skill set for today’s leaders. The substance is always changing and out of control in recent years. The future of technology is literally beyond our imagination. The messaging around chaos will become as important as the decision. The role for leaders, therefore, will be embracing AI, whilst tempering our emotional response to change. Fortunately, these leaders are seeing, I think, the dot com era of AI. And that means this anticipation and response is actually familiar to many of them. The ability and opportunity to use AI is more prevalent than ever. Certainly, it is becoming a part of our operational systems and content creation in the professional sense. But companies are not wrong to pace their implementation of AI, and certainly leaders are right to temper the emotion around it.

This article first appeared on The Robert Kovach Blog.

Dr. Robert Kovach has spent his entire career working as a trusted advisor to senior leaders wanting to improve the effectiveness of themselves, their teams and their companies. Prior to starting his own consulting firm, Robert led the global executive assessment and development team for Cisco. Earlier in his career Robert held leadership roles with RHR International, PepsiCo, Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School and the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.