Use A Win-Win Philosophy

#LeadershipInTheAgeOfAI

In this era of humans working with machines, being an effective leader with artificial intelligence (AI) takes a range of skills and activities. In this series, I provide an incisive roadmap for leadership in the age of AI.

The promise of AI is that it will be transformative and valuable for all humans. To create this bright future, enterprise leaders have an opportunity today to use AI to simultaneously improve the business and improve social impact.

Organizations invest in AI because of the value it can create for the enterprise, whether it is in enhanced capacity and efficiency, improved customer engagement and personalization or in deriving entirely new products, services and business models. Investment leads to intellectual property and differentiating use cases, and given the cost and high stakes associated with AI programs, there may be a sentiment within the business that AI capabilities should be closely guarded and used only for the benefit of the organization.

This perspective may limit the good AI can yield for everyone, including the business.

Enterprise leaders may be better served by embracing a win-win philosophy with AI, where it is viewed as a driver of business value and a boon for social progress and well-being.

Many enterprises already have a social impact office or team that seeks to leverage business success to address stubborn societal problems and promote equity and growth. They may also have existing partnerships or alliances with nonprofits, NGOs or local organizations focused on the public’s welfare—organizations that likely lack the funding, human capital and technical expertise required for cutting-edge AI deployments at scale.

Therein is the opportunity.

At its core, it is a matter of identifying adjacent organizations and use cases where business AI programs can deliver returns for the public good. To help prompt creative thinking about this opportunity, consider some of the AI applications that could have multiple applications.

? An AI model that automates personalized marketing for product promotion could be redeployed by a nonprofit that uses the model for increasing donations, which is a perpetual challenge for nonprofits. The function of the model is effectively the same: tailoring content to individuals so as to persuade some action. For the business, that outcome may be increased sales, but for a nonprofit, the result may be more effective and efficient processes to raise donations. In this, the enterprise that developed the model can see compounded gains, as greater nonprofit resources can fuel more activity and outreach.

? The advent of generative AI has unleashed powerful new capabilities, and one area is document search and summary. With a simple natural language prompt, some generative AI models can consult huge datasets of documents, policies and reports and provide a summary, which allows the user to make a data-driven decision. For organizations promoting the public good, this capability could help automate and improve processes around activities that are document-intensive, such as nonprofit reporting, requests for proposals and grant applications.

? An AI application for onboarding employees can streamline and standardize the process, using automation to provide new employees with information and documents around roles and responsibilities, benefits, contracts and more. Nonprofits and similar organizations face the challenge of onboarding volunteers for outreach and fundraising, and an employee onboarding AI system could be tweaked and redeployed for this adjacent use case.

? It’s not only the model itself that is valuable. The technology infrastructure and training data needed to create and run AI demands significant investment and human capital, so much so that NGOs facing a more modest budget, limited technology maturity and smaller workforce may be hard pressed to access the enormous value in the age of AI. Enterprises that have already made investments in infrastructure and data have an opportunity to provide these enabling assets to help nonprofits and similar organizations train and manage AI.

Consider how your company can kick off a cycle of benefits.

Importantly, sharing AI knowledge and assets is not a one-way value chain, where the business invests in AI and simply hands it over to an adjacent group. Instead, taking a win-win philosophy with AI can kick off a virtuous cycle of benefits.

For example, a model that is developed for employee training could be adjusted to provide a publicly accessible model that promotes education around things like finances, health and literacy. This can have a direct impact on the well-being and prosperity of local communities, as well as the quality of the future workforce. In this scenario, everyone wins.

To be sure, use cases are varied, as are models. As such, leaders are called to think creatively about the AI capabilities they build and how they can be used beyond their original intent to provide positive societal impact. Ultimately, sharing AI knowledge and capabilities can help propel AI to its full potential and deliver benefits for all people.

Originally published at https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/people/beenaammanath1/?sh=33cfc0b2bd3e