Generative AI & Meta-Leaders

In the wake of advances in generative AI and large language models (LLMs), there is excitement about what the technology means for businesses. But we should not forget that this advancement is also posing a catch-22 situation to the traditional leadership. The transformative potential and rapid acceleration of generative AI are creating an imperative for them to act quickly. They should rethink their skillsets and develop new skillsets like – ability to make better sense of data insights, ability to ask better questions, ability to learn from smart mistakes etc.

It is true that ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. In just 5 days since its launch in November last year, it gained one million users, a feat that no other popular online services have managed to achieve. But it is not the only generative AI tool, others include Midjourney and Dall-E for images generation, GitHub Copilot for coding, and even conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) such as Pix2Pix, developed by NVIDIA, that is used for image-to-image translation.

The reality is that the impact of AI on businesses, and even the world, is so deep that Andrew Ng, the former head of AI at Baidu and partner of the AI Fund, said that “AI is the new electricity”. It is generating so many new opportunities to businesses that want to generate new value through innovation that, we can call it “the new refrigeration”. Warren Buffet always tells a story about refrigeration, saying that the person that invented refrigeration, of course, made some money, but most of the money was made by Coca-Cola, which used refrigeration to build an empire.

Generative AI can be seen as the “new refrigeration”, where there will definitely be some money made in it, but the big money will be made by the “Coca-Colas” of AI that have yet to be built, or by the traditional companies that are going to reinvent themselves via AI. Overall, the AI market is so big that according to Precedence Research, while the global AI market size was estimated at US $119.78 billion in 2022, it is expected to hit US $1.59 trillion by 2030, with a registered CAGR of 38.1% from 2022 to 2030.

It is clear now that Generative AI represents a great opportunity for companies to optimize their workflow, generate efficiencies and scale their production of content, but a question keeps haunting in the minds of all of us: “If Generative AI is so good, will it soon replace me at work?”. Software developers look at the lines of code generated by Chat-GPT with a mix of fear and apprehension as much as copywriters, editors, and many other professionals. Even leaders feel the same. “I am expected to be the retainer of knowledge within the company, with the most experience, and now a chat-bot comes in and supposedly knows more than me?”, they think.

But as with everything, there are two ways to approach the rise of generative AI as leaders. One way is, to fight it off and believe that the traditional leadership role and skill set are never going to change. Another way is to embrace the power of Generative AI, understand what it does better than us, and outsource all of that to it. The result? More time is available to focus on leading in a novel manner. 

 

Let’s take a deep dive and understand the new traits the leadership should possess in this fast changing environment to transform themselves to “meta-leaders” - the leaders who are able to move past the traditional expectations related to leadership and understand that AI is an ally and not a threat.

1. The ability to better make sense of the insights generated by AI and to select the right KPIs to monitor. What I mean by that is in a world where everything is measurable and where the volume of data generated reached 97 Zettabytes, data is now a commodity, at the same time where AI is extremely proficient at processing such data and generating insights out of it, the real challenge for leaders is to choose the metrics to be monitored and prioritized then extracting insights from them by “making sense” of all this data. The choice of these metrics and the correlations between them will bring about innovative insights that their competition may not even be looking at, leading to a competitive advantage for the leaders and companies.
   
   
2. The ability to ask better questions instead of just providing pre-formatted answers and to think critically about new business problems in a world that is changing very fast. As said earlier that if Chat-GPT today retains much more knowledge than any human being, the true role of leadership is to asking better questions rather just answering in order to better understand the world that is changing exponentially. It is like holding a “beginner’s mindset” rather than just an expert mindset. Think of a 4 or 5-year-old children’s who ask 100’s of question a day, but the same does not hold true for adults. A bit like these children, leaders constantly challenge their personality and get to “know that they don’t know” in a world of infinite information, and to ask the right questions to make up for this gap. It is no longer the leader’s ability to perceive that matters; it’s their ability to re-perceive by constantly rethinking and relearning. We should keep this in mind that human reasoning is not just about logically combining existing knowledge to come up with a solution or critique of a problem. It is also about reasoning beyond the universe of current knowledge and using imagination to form new ideas, whereas Artificial Intelligence can only look for solutions from its current set of existing knowledge.
   
   
3. The ability to learn from “smart mistakes”. Finally, if AI is so good to be mistakes-free, leaders should understand that their duty becomes to experiment more to learn through some of the human mistakes and inefficiencies. Although this might seem off and counterintuitive because leaders in business want to avoid mistakes. Because they don’t want to deal with their consequences or the possibility of being perceived as weak or incapable of doing the job. But think about the positive consequences, learning is an outcome. when one person learns from a mistake and shares their learnings with someone else, they open the door for collaboration. Mistakes makes us stronger because they make us more prepared for what’s next. Once we understand, we can learn from our mistakes, we can change our attitude towards them and start experimenting more. And it is not just about learning from our mistakes but using them to get stronger. This is an “antifragile leader” that allows himself to fail while exploring unknown territories in a world where AI guarantees effectiveness in the known ones.

The truth is that as technology changes, leadership must too, because all other change within an organization starts with the leader. Technological revolutions have always caused some degree of disruption, but what we are currently experiencing with AI will be far greater than ever before because of the high degree of exponentiality and because some AI skills (in particular, Generative AI) overlap human ones. This is why now is the time to start understanding and developing the necessary skill set to become the meta-leader your company needs and leveraging on the power of AI to grow your business even more.

 

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