Elevating Leadership Part 5: Becoming an AI-Empowered Leader
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Bi-weekly, we delve into the trends, challenges, and opportunities that fuel worker-first solutions.
In this edition, we explore:
The pace of change in artificial intelligence is reshaping industries and keeping company leadership on alert. This edition of our Elevating Leadership completes our series and explores how AI-enabled leaders are redefining best practices in the C-suite, making strategic decisions faster, and enhancing their team's productivity and creativity.
AI is fast integrating into SaaS technology executives and their companies already use, accelerating total AI user counts into the billions.
But what does the working life of an AI-empowered leader look like?
The AI-Empowered Leader
An AI-empowered leader embodies the qualities all leaders aspire to without AI: precision, people orientation, awareness of evolving metrics, and the ability to create and deepen a dynamic, aligned culture. AI enables leaders to realise their strategic goals by saving time, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks.
As Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, shared on Microsoft’s WorkLab podcast, not only is AI having a transformational impact, we are evolving to a more seamless era of human-computer interaction.
“Everything that we can see about the future of tech is that it’s going to be more and more like having a conversation and less and less like using a calculator.”
As AI becomes more intuitive and conversational, leaders must react with a reminder for their teams of the importance of in-person interactions, to balance operational efficiency with the human elements of leadership.
The Reality
Leaders can take advantage of AI tools and AI models integrated directly into their existing SaaS stacks. AI is proving especially useful at lifting administrative weight, synthesising large data and extracting key insights to inform decision making.
AI-empowered leaders leverage their time by embracing early wins from AI development like incorporating AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot, Otter.ai and ChatGPT into their personal tech stacks to accelerate administrative workflows. Integrating AI effectively presents an opportunity to create more free time for leaders to think strategically and focus on more people-orientated work (Infomineo).
Adoption is Growing
In McKinsey’s 2024 State of AI survey, half of respondents say their organisations have adopted AI in two or more business functions, up from less than a third of respondents in 2023. 67 percent expect their organisations to invest more in AI over the next three years.
Practical examples of AI's impact are emerging as companies move from test to deployment.
Mastercard uses AI-powered MetricStream to enhance its risk management processes, reducing the time needed to assess risks by over 66%.
Similarly, Cloudflare employs Eightfold.ai's talent management solutions to handle a vast number of applications efficiently, streamlining the volume of their talent acquisition by managing 1 million applicants per quarter.
The Transition to AI-enabled leadership
So, AI-enabled leaders are those who are tactfully employing AI to reduce costs, increase revenue, accelerate data analysis and unlock time for collaborative and strategic work. But as AI continues to evolve, leaders must ensure they build their AI literacy and ethical understanding to leverage its full potential. Those who effectively balance AI capabilities with the essential soft skills of leadership will shape the future of leadership practice.
AI-empowered leaders are those, who follow Sal Khan’s, of Khan Academy’s, advice,
"AI should improve human purpose. People are going to be augmented by artificial intelligences…but they’re just a magnification of human intent."
AI can contribute to support data analytics, administration and a plethora of other tasks but we must ensure any productivity surplus enables leaders to focus on vision, culture, and people - elements that AI cannot replicate. AI-enabled leaders are exploring how to leverage this value while being mindful of where AI may not belong, considering factors like their leadership style, hybrid-remote setups, and cross-geography management.
What’s Next?
We believe leaders should focus on building aggressively tailored AI strategies that align with their organisation's unique needs and their individual beliefs. Without this focus, they risk applying AI too broadly across products, processes, and people, which will only lead to ineffective outcomes and mixed signals to teams.
A truly AI-enabled workplace is an augmented one that has engaged and happy workers who are enabled to do great work by their digital tools and are empowered through the benefits of independent and flexible work.
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Until next time, Many thanks!
from the NoBa Team 🧡