Execs must use AI and understand it — but don’t become ‘too enamored’ by the technology, warn business leaders

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Today’s business leaders are under intense pressure to become experts in AI, and even technically-minded CIOs may feel as if they need to know more than they already do. But given the rapid pace of change in AI, defining AI expertise within a business can be tricky.  

“I don’t think we’ve yet defined what ‘expert’ really means, because there’s no certification yet for just ‘expert’ in AI today — the minute you do that, there’s another piece of technology that’s going to be developed,” Salesforce’s chief commercial and customer officer LaShonda Anderson-Williams said at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference last week.

Juan Orlandini, Chief Technology Officer of Insight, advised business leaders not to get distracted by the “shiny object” and to focus instead on the same key principles that a business would follow for any enterprise app project.  “You start with a use case that you’re trying to solve for,” Orlandini said, and figure out if the expense of the project can be justified through a return on investment or a cost savings. After that, focus on the classic elements of any software deployment: how to scale it, how to secure it, and so on.  “We kind of forgot about that in this hype around AI. This is just another enterprise app. That’s it,” he said.

The warning of becoming too focused on AI technology itself was echoed by Edward Jones’ Chief Strategy Officer Hasan Malik, who said business leaders should think of their AI knowledge in three buckets: What you need to know, what’s nice to know, and what’s too much to know.  Malik cited understanding the cost of deploying AI as the main “need to know” issue for a business leader, while being a user of AI and gaining a firsthand understanding of the technology is a “nice to know.” But if you become too enamored with the technology of AI, you risk losing sight of the business case, Malik cautioned.

Still, if a leader or a team feels anxiety about their level of AI knowledge, it’s not unusual said Louise Barrere, senior managing director of Accenture’s Center for Advanced AI. “There is so much out in the market around what is actually real and is available today to be used, versus still being talked about, and in experimenting or testing,” she said.

One good way to boost your AI expertise is simply to start using the technology, said Salesforce’s Anderson-Williams.   It’s about “building space and a place for your organization to actually experience, test and quite frankly fail,” she said. “So they can understand what it’s going to feel like on the other end and what type of experience they’re trying to design…not just your engineering team, but your marketers, everyone in the organization.”

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