Wise Leadership in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Are robots coming for your job? Yes and no. According to a Dell Technologies survey, 82% of leaders expect their employees and machines to work as “integrated teams”. And many employees look forward to artificial intelligence (AI) that can help them do their job better.

But not everybody has such a rosy outlook. In Australia, the report “Australia’s Future Workforce” predicts about 40% of jobs could be lost to robotics, automation and artificial intelligence in the next 10-15 years. And many employees are stressed about robophobia: the fear of losing their job due to these forces.

If you’re a leader, you have an added role as you navigate your team and organization through this fast-changing world: to help your people adapt, integrate, and embrace the changes that AI will bring. This role requires empathy, care, sensitivity, and yes – more than a smattering of wisdom.

How do you apply wise leadership in the age of AI?

Let’s start by looking at how you build wisdom. It happens in four stages:

1. You start by learning a new skill.
2. Through many hours of experience through deliberate practice, you develop mastery in that skill.
3. Then, by applying your mastery in different contexts, you learn to exercise good judgment.
4. All this experience means you acquire a higher perspective, which leads to wisdom.

Obviously, different people are at different stages, and that can even vary within different roles in their job. If they are at any of the first three stages – skill, mastery, or judgment – you can help them understand the impact of AI and automation on their role.

Skill: AI will replace many skills and some jobs.

There’s no doubt some people will lose their jobs because computers and robots will have the same – or better – skills than humans. In the past, this was obvious for manual labour and blue-collar jobs, but it’s increasingly true for higher-level roles as well.

As a wise leader, you will have to help people move out of these jobs. This won’t be an easy task, but if you know it’s likely to happen, act decisively, so your people have as much time as possible to adapt. The worst thing you can do is delay the inevitable.

Mastery: AI will accelerate the experience curve.

If mastery requires deliberate practice, AI can help by accelerating the experience curve. For example, it can provide customized learning paths, assist coaching and mentoring, help people design individual career paths, and help HR and L&D professionals manage the talent requirements of your organization.

As a wise leader, identify ways to involve AI in this kind of learning and development for your people. Most people know they will need more learning to adapt to a changing world, and this is an opportunity for you to introduce AI in a positive, non-confrontational way.

Judgment: AI can help people make judgment calls.

Much of the negative media around AI has involved it making seemingly arbitrary judgment calls: turning down qualified candidates for senior roles, determining who qualifies for a home loan, showing racial bias in police arrests, and so on.

We’re not yet at the point where we should trust AI to make those judgment calls, but it can help us make those calls. For example, it can analyze large volumes of data quickly, provide relevant information for making informed decisions, and monitor behavior to determine the results of actions.

As a wise leader, assess the power of AI to help your people. This is all about humans and machines being better together than either could be alone. You have probably always done this with technology, but you might not realize just how powerful and affordable AI technology has become.

Will you be a wise leader in the age of AI?

According to research by MIT Sloan Management Review, 85% of leaders believe AI can help them gain a competitive advantage. And Gartner predicts the greatest source of competitive advantage for 30% of organizations will come from leveraging AI and related technologies.

But the real story is not about computers; it’s about people. We have never needed wise leadership as much as we need it now. Will you be one of those wise leaders?

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