As business leaders continue to find the best tools to help them make decisions, A.I. … (+)
In 1998, Yahoo, the Internet titan of the tech industry in the late 1990s and early 1920s, refused to buy Google for $1 million. In 2002, Yahoo tried to buy Google for $3 billion and when Google said it wanted $5 billion, Yahoo again said no. Today, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has a market capitalization of just over $2 trillion, and Yahoo, for its part, was acquired by Verizon for $4.48 billion in 2017.
This Yahoo-Google dance from more than 20 years ago tells the story of how a single decision could make or break a business. While some bad business decisions are not fatal, most have devastating consequences. This is why effective decision-making remains a top priority for business leaders today. And for many years, C-suites have been constantly inundated with promising tools to transform their decision-making capabilities.
Today, as AI spreads across industries around the world and transforms the way businesses do things, many leaders are harnessing its potential to fundamentally change the way they strategize, mitigate risk, get the right ROI on your investments and stimulate growth. What more? Futurists like Khalfan Belhoul, CEO of the Dubai Future Foundation, predict that we could even see the first board member of a Fortune 500 company by 2025.
This is a bold prediction, based on a growing body of evidence. AI doesn’t just produce projections and reports; it is increasingly capable of advising business leaders, identifying market trends and even suggesting concrete strategies based on real-time data. But what does an AI-driven board member actually look like, and how could AI power the C-Suite in the future?
AI in the meeting room
“We’ve seen AI do incredible things, from diagnosing diseases to driving, predicting financial trends and even creating art, but we’ve also seen the emergence of AI in roles leadership,” Belhoul said in the welcome address recently at the Dubai Future Forum.
“Last year, the first AI humanoid CEO has been appointed by a European company to lead with data-driven precision and strategic insights. But now you might see an AI-driven leader, not a humanoid. I expect the first Fortune 500 company to have its first AI board member in the coming year.
There is already a wide range of AI tools enabling decision makers to operate at unprecedented levels of efficiency. Take for example Levi Strauss & Co., which was using AI to anticipate consumer demand and adjust its supply chain in real time. “We are focused on accelerating our e-commerce capabilities and using data and AI to meet our customers where they are, delivering the products they want, when and how they want them,” said Marc Rosen, president of Levi Strauss Americas, on a podcast by the National Retail Federation.
But the idea of an artificial intelligence board member is radical and quite untraditional. Still, Belhoul thinks it could happen next year. “AI tools like ChatGPT are already helping many IT leaders build plans and plan better for their business,” he told me. “The next logical step is to integrate AI tools into decision-making processes across all management functions.”
Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, echoes this sentiment. She said “this is just the beginning” and noted that while big language models and GenAI have been the highlights of the current wave of AI, the next wave will be on big action models. – AI models that predict what we will do.
“While LLMs like ChatGPT are leading the current wave, the next frontier will be LAMs,” Webb told me. “LAMs will go beyond information processing: they will anticipate the decisions we make and suggest smarter alternatives.”
The ethical dilemma of AI
While Utku Kaynar, founder and CEO of Buck – the AI platform that automates planning and resource allocation in field services – noted that “a board member driven by the AI would act as a decision support system, analyzing the data to provide recommendations to humans could take days.” to address,” he warned that “AI lacks context, ethics and empathy, which are essential in board decisions.”
For Kaynar, the role of AI would complement that of human directors, providing data-driven insights while leaving final decisions to humans. He added, however, that clear guidelines are needed on accountability and transparency, ensuring effective collaboration between AI and human intelligence. Regulatory frameworks for AI ethics could help guide companies on the path to responsible AI.
Kaynar is not the only industry leader advocating caution and thoughtfulness when using AI. As Kate Hancock, founder of the Global AI Council, pointed out, “AI is not perfect: it reflects the data we feed it. » “Many companies experience issues with biased recommendations from incomplete data sets and it takes months to refine their data pipelines to ensure fairness and accuracy.
Bias in AI results is one of the main reasons why business leaders, according to TechRadarhave difficulty trusting AI, even if they recognize its potential. “4 in 10 executives agree that their data is not yet ready for accurate data outputs,” according to a report from Terdata and NewtonX.
Other key issues, Kaynar said, include data privacy and algorithmic opacity. “Businesses must ensure responsible use of data and comply with regulations such as GDPR. Biased models can lead to unfair results, making transparency and accountability essential. He added that some solutions to these challenges include audits to detect bias, clear reporting on AI decisions, and diverse development teams.
Hancock also noted that companies that want to reduce bias in their AI models need to focus more on their data pipelines, prioritizing processes like data sourcing, labeling, and data validation. data. “The data set is where everything happens. Remove bias from the dataset and you would have effectively removed bias from your AI.
Move on
As we move closer to an era where AI could sit on corporate boards, it is essential to approach this change with a balanced dose of enthusiasm and caution. The potential for AI to transform decision-making processes is immense, but it requires deliberate implementation and monitoring.
“Risk is inherent in innovation,” Belhoul said, “but companies that adopt AI thoughtfully – combining technology with vision and leadership – will become the industry leaders of tomorrow. »
For leaders, the message is clear: AI is no longer a futuristic buzzword. This is a strategic advantage – and perhaps the most transformative in recent memory.