Talking sensibly about AI with your board
Stephen Moffitt
Fractional CDO setting up businesses to grow through data-driven decisions | SF writer
As a senior leader, I’m sure you’re bombarded with opinions, recommendations, insight and 10-step action plans on how to respond to AI. If you distil down the cacophony of voices, three camps emerge:
How can you work out a coherent position and strategy to assure your board, stakeholders and colleagues that you can lead the business through all the noise and uncertainty?
Drawing on over 20 years of experience and research, I suggest cutting through the noise and taking a pragmatic, sober view. This view recognises that:
AI is a tool
The first step is to create a bit of distance from the hype that the evangelists and doomsayers promote. Recognise that AI is just a tool, not some wave or storm bearing down on you. Since it’s a tool, it serves an aim. A hammer is useful if you want to build a wooden house. If you want to knit a sweater, it’s not of much use. So, sit down with your board and senior exec and refine your vision. What sort of company do you want to be going forward? What do you see as your market and your offering in the next few years, or even in a decade?
Once the vision is clear, then ask, “How can AI move us toward this vision?” This question is important because of the next point.
AI is immature
While artificial intelligence technologies have been around for decades, it’s only in the last few years that the conditions have appeared to support its widespread use. When I led the development of my first AI tool in 2008, building a recommendation engine was an R&D project. Today, there are APIs that can provide much better recommendations than we could even imagine back then. Of course, generative AI is even newer.?
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One result of AI’s immaturity is that we don’t know what the “killer app” will be. Like the web in the early 90s, it wasn’t clear what it would be used for and, therefore, where value could be realised. Even the tools were still uncertain. We used to have to code websites to render on many, very different browsers, then spend time testing them on a bank of machines, each configured differently. As a result of these factors, a lot of money was spent on developing websites with little certainty that they would be what customers wanted.
It’s the same today with AI. This means that any use of AI, even if it’s only to improve efficiency and productivity, needs to be assessed critically by you and the board. In the beginning of a technology shift, it’s sensible to hedge your bets on where AI can deliver value. This is why the focus on the company’s vision is essential. If AI is a medium-term technology, it should be aligned with the vision, not necessarily this year’s key objectives. This allows you to adapt to the ongoing evolution or the technology by evaluating it against the direction of the company vision.?
Given this uncertainty, I’ve seen that boards and senior execs often opt for caution. They don’t commit to any AI projects until the situation becomes clearer. This approach appears sensible and is even aligned with the contrarian view I mentioned above. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take into account the fact that AI isn’t a tool, like a hammer, that you can just bring in whenever you need it. It is like a heat pump that requires an infrastructure in order to make work.
AI requires a strong data foundation
Waiting until it’s clear how AI will evolve will put your business at a disadvantage if you don’t move ahead with putting in place the necessary infrastructure: your data foundations. AI is built on data, so you need to have the necessary quality and quantity of data available for AI tools. One of the painful lessons many organisations discover when the start investing in AI is that they have work to do to improve their data:
In addition, there is a business change component to AI. Even if the use case is as seemingly simple as scanning documents and creating summaries, it can lead to changes in business processes, models and resourcing. As any leader who has gone through a transformation knows, preparing the business for the change, listening, experimenting and communicating are key to success. All these take time. As a result, you would do well to encourage your board to move ahead, even in the face of the uncertainty about the evolution of AI. The better the data foundations are, the easier it will be to bring in AI tools and to change them if needed.?
Talking to the board about AI
In a world of confusion and noise around AI, you can position yourself as a true leader by talking to you board sensibly about AI. Start by helping them to focus on how AI will move the business forward over the next years toward realising the company vision. You can educate the board on where AI is on its evolutionary path to prevent everyone from running after the latest fad or release. At the same time, you can encourage them to move forward now by establishing the data foundations and preparing the business for the impact of AI as you start testing AI use cases.