Artificial Intelligence: How Can You Keep Up? (Part 1)
Note: There are so many Artificial Intelligence (AI) articles circulating at the moment on the technical side. This is different, it’s about the people side of AI, what this means for leaders in particular.
NEARLY A QUARTER OF C-SUITE EXECUTIVES ARE USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS
Artificial Intelligence (AI) AI is defined as the ability of a computer or robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings; however, this is bigger than simply technology and robots.
AI’s impact on society will be on par with the mega trends of personal computing, internet, mobile and social media. Those technologies completely revolutionized the way we communicated, learned, worked, and played—and created some unforeseen (and sometimes unwanted) consequences.
Expertise in AI is one of our previously identified 5 critical leadership traits for 2023 and beyond. A recent McKinsey survey shows that AI has risen from a topic relegated to tech employees to a focus of company leaders: nearly one-quarter of surveyed C-suite executives say they are personally using AI tools for work, and more than one-quarter of respondents from companies using AI say it is already on their Boards’ agendas.
Of the ten emerging technologies of 2023, AI has the highest rating for disrupting existing industries and creating new markets. If you are not disrupting the market, then you are being disrupted. As a leader today, AI is not something you can ignore and tackle later.
In summary, we need to become proficient now to stay in the game and make timely decisions and wise investments in AI to help our business, and better serve our customers.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
This is a 2-part series to help leaders come to grips with AI:
- Part 1: If you haven’t engaged personally with AI and are looking for the “What is it?” and “How is it being used?” then this article is for you. We will show you how to use AI and what type of AI to start with.
- Part 2: If you are past the “What is it?” stage and want to use it throughout your business then click here for Part 2 of this series on AI which shows “How Leaders Can Leverage AI”.
WHAT IS EVERYONE USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR TODAY?
Today, when people talk about AI they are usually talking about Generative AI (Gen AI). Gen AI describes systems that can be used to create new content. This content can be text, images, computer code, audio, and even videos. Common Gen AI tools for image generation include DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Leonardo.ai. Text and computer code generation tools include OpenAI’s ChatGPT (funded by Microsoft), Google’s Bard, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude. These tools are all based on a technology called Large Language Models (LLMs).
According to research by McKinsey, the most popular use case for Gen AI is crafting the first draft of documents. However, McKinsey reports that there are many other uses from identifying trends in customer needs to using chatbots for customer service (See Table 1).
TABLE 1: THE MOST COMMON USE CASES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Looking to the near future, Gartner predicts that AI adoption will increase significantly over the next 5 years:
- By 2024, 40% of enterprise applications will have embedded conversational AI, up from less than 5% in 2020.
- By 2025, 30% of enterprises will have implemented an AI-augmented development and testing strategy, up from 5% in 2021.
- By 2026, generative design AI will automate 60% of the design effort for new websites and mobile apps.
- By 2026, over 100 million humans will engage robocolleagues to contribute to their work.
- By 2027, nearly 15% of new applications will be automatically generated by AI without a human in the loop. This is not happening at all today.
Every leader and every department should be testing out use cases for Gen AI on a daily or weekly basis. This is the best way to start learning about AI and not be left behind.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
The AIs in use today fall into the category of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). These are systems that are designed and trained for a specific task or a limited range of tasks. There is speculation about categories of AI with broader capabilities “Artificial General Intelligence” or even “Artificial Superintelligence”, however, these are not available yet.
An overview of the different categories of AI is given in Table 2.
TABLE 2: AI CATEGORIES
For more information on the application of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), see our article “A Broader Look at Narrow ANI”.
WHAT CAN I DO TODAY SO I DON’T GET LEFT BEHIND ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
Gen AI is a tool to help us work smarter. It won’t make people instantly redundant, but instead, it will help people do their work better and quicker—and that means we won’t need as many leaders, managers, or staff to do the same amount of work. We will all want to be in the group that is still relevant in the workforce. The key message here is that AI won’t replace humans but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.
As a leader, the best place to start developing your AI Expertise trait is to use AI yourself. The natural tool to start with is ChatGPT. It comes in a free version, but the upgraded paid version is so cheap that there’s no reason not to use that. Table 3 shows how to sign up for the ChatGPT tool and get started using it.
TABLE 3: HOW TO GET STARTED WITH GEN AI, SIGN UP FOR ChatGPT
AT TOP GUN VENTURES WE ARE USING ChatGPT OURSELVES
Here at Top Gun Ventures, we know from our own experience that Gen AI is easy to use and quickly adds value. We use it to create the first drafts of documents. It’s not perfect, you still need human expertise, however, these tools save time and mental effort. Table 4 shows an example of how we used this AI tool.
TABLE 4: EXAMPLE OF HOW TOP GUN VENTURES USES GEN AI TO CREATE A FIRST DRAFT
THE BOTTOM LINE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Just jump in and start using Gen AI to develop the content you need in your current role. It might be crafting an email, editing a letter, preparing a report or getting information on a topic of interest. Jumping in is the best way to experience AI’s power and limitations. You should aim to use it for content as often as you use Google for search today. That hands-on experience provides the basis for leading the company into this new AI-enabled world.
Ultimately, AI will enhance productivity, add value to your products and services, and possibly disrupt your industry and create new markets. It can bring you new ways to embrace today’s unpredictable markets and seize new opportunities.
If you are not finding opportunities to use Gen AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, Llama, or Claude on a daily or weekly basis, then you are likely on a path to being left behind.
We hope this is helpful and unleashes your latent ingenuity to further develop your ‘AI Expertise’. You can read Part 2: “How Leaders Can Leverage AI” here.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already disrupting existing industries and creating new markets and this will demand a new set of leadership archetypes. If you have an interest to explore further, let’s chat.
Back to Insights