In the words of our Director, Richard Chiumento, “You probably will not lose your job to AI, but you will lose it to a human who is using AI effectively.” An organisation is extremely unlikely to replace its leadership team with artificial intelligence (AI), but rather must enable its C-Suite to form a strategic relationship with technology to drive impact. Doing so will require a baseline understanding of how AI can benefit the business, and how to derive maximum value from it.
While many existing roles will be replaced by technology over time, businesses are unlikely to eliminate their entire workforce in favour of technology, despite the bleak predictions we often see making headlines. Rather, what lies ahead is a massive reshaping of the working world and ‘modern’ workplace as we have traditionally known it through the optimisation of everything we do, every process, and every production. The C-Suite will hold the responsibility of guiding the organisation through this transformation, which will require effective management and fostering a closer relationship with technology by all.
In this article, we provide key factors for organisations and senior leaders to consider to effectively leverage the current AI wave.
Business use of AI can be split into two categories: tactical and strategic. What this looks like in practice will vary by business, but here are some general use cases to be aware of based on the solutions available in the marketplace:
The C-suite will likely have very little to do with the tactical uses of AI as part of their everyday role but should still be concerned with these practices. Team leaders should decide which systems to adopt, which vendors to work with, and where to invest. For this to be successful, each member of the C-suite will need to work collaboratively with their teams to identify where opportunities and efficiencies sit.
It is therefore critical for the leadership team to understand how specific areas of the business can benefit from the adoption of technology and how that might feed into the bigger picture. For example, the marketing, customer service, and sales functions are the most outward-facing functions of the business and stand to benefit greatly from the introduction of AI systems. It is likely that these functions will use generative AI to automate their communications with customers, create more compelling materials, become more targeted, and deliver the right offer in the right place at the right time. The CMO and CRO will need to work with these teams to find out which tasks could benefit most from AI’s helping hand and crafting a case for investment.
On the Operations and Supply Chain side, ongoing disruption has made an already challenging role even more difficult. The expectations placed on the COO will be to improve decision making, keep things running smoothly, and ensure cost efficiencies. They will need to think about how AI can facilitate innovation and identify how investing in new tools might improve long-term revenue and contribute to overall productivity and efficiency.
The urgent business need for digital transformation has fundamentally changed the CIO role from IT operator to business strategist. The CTO and CIO will be concerned with the technicalities of AI adoption and will most likely lead any conversations about vendors and tools. The ability to communicate the value of complex technology to the business is critical, as is the skill to drive and manage long-term change. Tactically, they will oversee the actual implementation of AI systems and need to ensure that the business possesses the necessary infrastructure, hardware, and software.
The CFO will most obviously be concerned about the cost of any AI investment and the returns it will generate. In addition, adopting the right AI will play a huge role in supporting the expectations of shareholders, regulators, and audit committees specifically in providing information in the areas of financial and nonfinancial reporting, transparency, and governance. The CFO will need to work closely with the other leaders to provide structures for governance of AI models to help ensure end-to-end AI governance. This will span from defining the AI strategy through training, testing, deploying and monitoring AI and the data used to train it.
Meanwhile, the CEO will have to keep a finger on the pulse of all this activity. They will be assimilating the massive amounts of data from AI initiatives taken forward by their peers to form answers to complex strategic questions at a massively accelerated rate. The CEO will also likely be the public face of the business’s transformation and will need to communicate with key stakeholder audiences both internally and externally.
In summary, despite not having a hands-on role in the tactical use of AI day-to-day, the C-Suite will need to stop going it alone and start thinking with a machine, using increasingly sophisticated analytic tools to help them rally the organisation. Selecting the right AI solutions, deciding what processes are automated, where money is spent, and how the business can benefit through business model transformation will be critical. This will require a need to ask questions that weren’t previously economical to answer as well as questions they didn’t even know to ask.
Most businesses possess more data than they know what to do with and in today’s increasingly digital age, even more is accumulated each day. This data is a goldmine of untapped potential that can offer a genuine snapshot of the business, its customers, stakeholders, and performance. However, to try to manually assess this data is a fool’s errand. It would take far too long and by the time any real progress is achieved, so much more new information will have been generated that the old data is obsolete.
Making sense of a business’s data in a tangible and useful way is the most valuable strategic benefit AI offers. In such a competitive landscape where customer habits change regularly and disruption is always on the horizon, having real-time insight into the business can help in staying ahead of the curve and gaining a competitive edge.
Measurement of KPIs is often focused on hard figures such as revenue, number of sales, and other tangible metrics. But every C-Suite executive knows that cost and value is often not that simple to nail down. There are often soft KPIs that are harder to measure but impact the business nonetheless. This includes reputational gains, employee or customer satisfaction, perceived CX, and loyalty. Because these indicators are not tied to an organisations figure, they are often harder to quantify.
AI can help with this, too. Again, the C-Suite will not need to have much direct interaction with tactical AI platforms on a regular basis, but these solutions and their activity can generate insights that can make the C-Suite more effective at what they do. For example, your marketing team’s social listening tool can provide insight into who your customers are, what matters to them, and how they feel about your business. Your sales team’s CRM platform will offer plenty of intelligence into what it takes to attract new prospects and what it takes to retain them. All of this information can be fed back to the C-Suite to help inform their wider strategy and measure success in a much more nuanced way.
The C-Suite will need to redefine the KPIs of the business for the AI age. This is where that grasp on the tactical side of AI comes into play. By understanding how each function of the business uses technology, it becomes possible to determine what can and should be measured. For example, if you know your sales team is using AI to manage relationships with existing customers, you can ask them to measure retention and loyalty. AI tools offer advanced reporting capabilities which help the C-Suite gain a deeper knowledge of the business as a whole. With this information in their arsenal, the leadership team can be much more targeted in their strategic objectives, agile in a crisis, and smarter with their budgeting.
But of course, with any significant change comes resistance, hesitation, and discomfort. It is likely that integrating AI into normal business practices will be met with all of these. Businesses are likely to encounter negative mindsets from their teams and this can include those in the C-Suite. Here are some common negative mindsets our team have come across and advice on how to overcome them
The C-Suite must be strategic about how they develop the necessary skills for successfully deploying AI and using it in practice. A lot of this will fall on the HRD and CPO, but each member of the C-Suite should be just as concerned and involved. Again, training will be necessary as AI skills will not just manifest on their own. The leadership team will need to decide the best approach for themselves, their people and budgets. In some cases, it may make sense to conduct in-house training led in collaboration with the Technology function and HR. It may also be of value to bring in outside experts such as vendors or consultants. You may need to conduct not only technical training, but also offer coaching to help create new mindsets conducive to supporting cultures of change. In other cases, it may make more sense to fund and encourage individuals to pursue their own upskilling and continuous learning development outside of the organisation. While this lifts the burden of having to organise training in-house, it offers less control. You may not be able to ensure that all of your people are developing the essential skills and covering the necessary bases. The C-Suite will need to seriously consider which option best suits their needs and shape their upskilling programmes accordingly.
You may also consider introducing necessary skills through recruitment. This is a strong option for securing more specialised skillsets that might be costly or time consuming to cultivate with existing team members. Depending on your needs, you may want to secure a full-time employee for this, or may find that a temporary contractor will suffice. However, given the ongoing skills shortage and fierce competition for qualified candidates, businesses should be prepared to face difficulties in securing the talent they need. The leadership team will need to consider their value proposition for new hires. Gaining an understanding of what today’s professionals expect from their employers can help to both attract and retain valuable talent. The C-Suite may need to reshape their hybrid work policies, employee benefits packages, and overall corporate culture.
While the AI landscape is fast-developing and ever-changing, adopting it successfully does not need to be difficult. If the C-Suite is willing to invest time and effort into their own learning whilst building the right physical and emotional infrastructures, the organisation is more likely to reap technology’s business value with minimal disruption.
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