Strategic AI: Domains of Disruption

I’m building out the materials for my new ‘Strategic AI’ workshop, based on the book ‘Engines of Engagement: a curious book about Generative AI’. In the first section, we start with a view of the future, which is a chance to explore our ‘Domains of Disruption’. There is a clear premise in this work that Generative AI will change things – change everything – but not necessarily in the same ways, at the same time. Some things will outlast others, and some Organisations will adapt, or disrupt, in different ways.

Indeed, that last sentence was a clue to one ‘Domain of Disruption’, that some Organisations will act defensively, whilst others will see the disruption as competitive edge. This speaks to AI as a sword, or a shield. Do we hide behind the ‘known’, driving efficiency and synergy, or do we also strike out, at both our competitors, but also our historic constraint?

Clearly Generative Ai will change ‘Technology’, everything from how we create slide decks to video, strategic plans to legal contracts, It may make us more uniform, or more creative. Or both, contextually. It may commoditise excellence I some domains, whilst creating new spaces for differentiation.

Most likely the initial, or original, skill may be ‘disrupted’ through the emergence of new advanced, complimentary, or alternative ‘skills’. Or the old skill may simply be eradicated.

Things like typography, grammar, project planning, summarising, even critical thinking and strategic planning. With some of these things we may find that AI will outperform or replace us, in others it will enhance us, and in some it will liberate us, or fail us.

Right now, we are largely either guessing, or generalising from specifics, neither of which is a clear strategy for success. And we know (as we explored in the book, at length), that ‘Human Exceptionalism’ will cost us dear – a dogged belief that you cannot ‘replace’ a human touch in a certain area. Indeed, the phrase ‘AI will never be able to do this as well as a human’ is one of the most dangerous instances of hope sheltering under dogmatic belief that you are likely to hear.

Right now, we simply do not know. And even those things we do know to be ‘true’ are unlikely to be ‘true’ forever.

This work is positioned ‘for people leading in the grey’: it’s not a treasure hunt. Not simply a case of looking ‘better’ or ‘harder’, but rather of building the lenses, structures, systems, and communities that can support our learning, experimentation, ‘sense making’, and ability to change. And change again, and again.

Sharing our view of the future can help us to recognise the lenses that we bring, which sometimes express themselves at the boundaries of our knowledge and stories. In this sense, our future ‘view’ can constrain our very thinking as we make our way there.

We need the ability to innovate within our existing systems – to optimise and drive efficiency and creativity – but also to innovate the very systems themselves, which may be a process of fracturing and re-conceptualisation of what which we are already certain about. We are re-authoring our Organisations in the most dramatic sense since their original Industrial conception, and we are likely to need to reinvent them on a continuous basis after that. Not one ‘match’ for one target, but rather a continuous ability to reshape, reform, re-imagine. And hence a new strategic imperative and capability.