Why Leadership Matters in the Age of AI

If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last year or more exploring ways that AI can benefit you at work and in your personal life.?I’ve found that AI does a great job helping me conduct highly efficient market research, provides insights from documents, generates communication, sums up videos, creates unique visuals and presentations, and gives me ideas on how to be more concise in my writing (no, AI did not write this article!).? Like many of you, I am an AI enthusiast.?AI will change the way we engage with information in many parts of our lives - especially in our working lives - much like the internet did 25 years ago.?

I recently took a hands-on class from MIT called Applied Generative AI for Digital Transformation, earning a certificate. Taught as live class instruction by MIT computer science professors Abel Sanchez and John Williams , we conducted hands-on exercises with many of the latest models and apps, diving deep into how AI works. We also discussed the impact of AI across industries, such as creating better patient outcomes in healthcare and advancing our understanding of diseases, gaining new AI-driven insights from the massive amounts of company siloed data, transforming customer service approaches, and exploring how AI could enable more personalized education and learning modalities.?

What struck me the most from the class is that regardless of the quality and quantity of training data, AI still needs significant feedback from real humans - called RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback). Without human intervention, AI tends to provide poor outcomes, misinterpret data and exhibit damaging biases. All of us have seen those news articles. There’s more work to do and many believe that RLHF may always be required for high quality AI performance.

This inspired me to think about the parallels with leadership. Just as AI needs human guidance, humans also need human guidance, in the form of great leadership.?Great leadership often makes the difference between the success and the failure of an organization. We need great leaders to lead our nations, companies and organizations of all types. I recently read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times and was struck by how high-quality leadership skills haven’t changed much over time - from Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, to FDR and LBJ, it takes human leadership to get really important things done.? Lincoln demonstrated leadership by, quite literally, going into the trenches to better understand the experience of civil war soldiers - inspiring him to drive forward with the Emancipation Proclamation. Teddy Roosevelt was a fearless problem-solver, willing to clear roadblocks to solve problems throughout the country, such as going beyond the defined presidential powers of the time to help the Pennsylvania governor end the coal miners strike of 1902 just in time for the winter months when coal was most needed. FDR took decisive and fast action in his first 100 days as president in 1933, bringing together a bipartisan approach to put America back on solid financial footing in the face of the great depression.?And LBJ, who drove the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had gained convictions about the importance of civil rights from his first job as a teacher in a marginalized and impoverished Texas community.

Great leaders set the pace for their teams - working tirelessly on ambitious and audacious goals. Great leaders seek to understand the experiences of others at all levels of their organization and use that knowledge to set the vision, execute to key goals and make decisions. Great leaders view it as their job to solve tough problems. Great leaders have the confidence to hire people more capable than themselves and then give them resources and ownership to creatively go after ambitious goals. Great leaders are good listeners.?Great leaders create trust and a safe environment for their teams and are willing to get in the trenches to solve challenges and clear out roadblocks. Great leaders are optimistic and not afraid to do hard things.?Great leaders give credit to their teams and celebrate the victories together. And great leaders find it?highly rewarding to build durable organizations and achieve ambitious outcomes while teaching and mentoring the next generations on how to become great leaders as well.??

There will always be a need for high-quality leadership.?AI can’t do this for us. And it's even more critical now that we need to collectively solve tough AI-induced challenges such as ensuring ethical and bias-free AI, creating sustainable energy use, addressing AI’s potential negative impact on employment rates, up-skilling our workforces on AI, ensuring that our children use AI appropriately to augment their education in positive ways, and guarding against our own potential existential risks from the introduction of AGI.

There’s a lot to be optimistic about how AI can bring us into a more positive future; yet it will take great leadership to make that future into a reality.