The AI-Savvy Leader
Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
Leaders, don't let AI get the best of you.
The AI transformation is underway, but where are the leaders who will ensure their companies implement AI successfully and responsibly? Up until now, leaders have largely ceded their role in the AI transformation, pushing strategy formulation out to tech teams and leaving investment decisions to groups that don't have a full view of the organization or its goals. Just when responsible leadership is more crucial than ever, leaders are abdicating their role in understanding and executing in the new world of human-machine collaboration. A generation of AI transformation failures awaits if leaders don't connect their use of AI to their strategies.
This book helps leaders take control of the wildly rapid deployment of AI across organizations. Clearly and concisely, it focuses on the nine actions leaders need to take in order to successfully preside over the transition to a more AI-centric future that will lead to growth for all—companies and workers—and avoid the kinds of mistakes that author David De Cremer has seen many early adopters make. What may surprise you is that the nine actions De Cremer focuses on are based on skills that are second nature to successful leaders: creating a vision, communicating well, and executing a strategy. But here he shows you how to apply these skills in the context of AI. This is not a book about mastering machine learning or any of the latest developments in AI technology itself. Rather, it's a clarion call for leaders to take their rightful place at the front of the AI revolution and lead their organizations successfully into the new world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this substantial business manual, De Cremer (Leadership by Algorithm), the dean of Northeastern University's business school, urges executives and managers to augment, rather than replace, human workers with AI. Outlining nine principles for integrating the technology into one's workflow, De Cremer argues, for instance, that AI should primarily be used to automate simple tasks so employees can spend more time on creative aspects of their job. He encourages managers to "develop a human-centered approach" and warns that an unnamed company's decision to use AI to monitor workers' progress on various projects resulted in more mistakes and higher turnover, which the author attributes to employees feeling "as if they were being treated like robots." The suggestions manage the difficult task of giving meaningful guidance while staying broad enough to apply across a variety of contexts, such as when De Cremer entreats readers to rank "repetitive and manual" tasks by effort or cost and then research "AI-based solutions to those problems." De Cremer's insistence that AI is no substitute for human workers gives the lie to unrealistic techno-utopian promises, and he demonstrates a refreshing willingness to topple corporate shibboleths, as when he warns that "efficiency isn't everything" because the moments of human inspiration that AI can't yet replicate rarely happen on a predictable timeline. This will make executives think twice before replacing their employees with software.