Leaders need AI education

In our changing world, the phrase “knowledge is power” is more relevant than ever.

AI is going to have an effect on every industry and market in the next decade. Some people claim AI is overhyped. Even if that is the case, we can still expect AI’s effect to be substantial. The burst of the dot com bubble didn’t stop internet companies from becoming some of the biggest and most successful in the world. We might be facing a similar turn of events with AI acting as the transformative technology of the decade.

In any technological transformation, there are winners, losers, and new players that enter the market. History is full of companies that did not adopt new technology in time and lost their market to more innovative players. An excellent example of this is Nokia that controlled the mobile phone market before the invention of smartphones or Kodak that did not make the move to digital cameras until it was too late. How can executives make sure their companies don’t face the same fate?

We can’t predict the future. This means we can’t completely safeguard ourselves from future developments in the industry. Nevertheless, we can do our best to ensure an organization isn’t on the losing side of a transformation, and give it advantages that will help it emerge as a winner. The best way to do this is to educate leaders about upcoming transformations. Educated leaders that understand the latest technological trends will be ready to adapt and adopt new technologies quickly. Educated leaders make educated organizations. Educated organizations make transformations faster.

While an industry may undergo some transformation after adopting new technology, most of its fundamentals remain the same. Nokia probably had both the technical expertise, the customer base and the infrastructure to compete with Apple when the iPhone came out. In fact, Samsung did just that and stayed a top player in the industry.

The leaders of an organization understand their business better than anyone else. Giving them the tools to recognize innovation opportunities is the best way to stay innovative. An AI expert will have a hard time developing solutions for the fintech industry because he probably doesn’t understand it well enough. A top executive in a bank will be much more qualified to suggest innovation initiatives in this space, with only a brief AI education.

This is what we do at The AI School For Leaders. We teach AI to decision-makers and give them the tools to combine their expertise and domain knowledge, in order to make their organization future-proof.

AI requires data. The biggest mistake non-future-proof organizations are making is not collecting enough data. Data collection takes time. Implementing data collection mechanisms will probably be the first move of an educated leader.

AI education for leaders is the strongest AI enabler. It enables a company to quickly implement any new AI capability, stay one step ahead of the competition and make sure it is the winner of the age of AI.