Why Executives Can’t Get Comfortable With AI

Executives need to have an understanding of information technology in order to derive business value from it and to productively interact with IT professionals. Nevertheless, IT experts have long lamented many executives’ limited knowledge of IT’s underlying functionality. In turn, many executives have (often unconsciously) declined to develop such IT literacy, preferring instead to focus their time and attention on domain and business matters.

However, recent evidence indicates that organizations that successfully unlock the strategic potential of artificial intelligence have executives and leaders who embody the opposite instinct: These leaders do have deeper knowledge of AI’s functionality.

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Based on several recent and ongoing AI literacy studies, including analyses of 6,986 executives’ AI skills, 645 companies’ board structures, and experimental studies on human-AI collaboration, we suggest a new guiding theme for executives’ AI literacy: Make technology-related discomfort a habit. Here are three ways to develop and practice the habit of maintaining AI literacy.

Seek the Discomfort of Continual Learning About AI

In order to navigate the business and technological implications of AI, executives must accept the discomfort of always being on the cutting edge with their own understanding of AI. There are two reasons for this. One, AI is an elusive (and now overused) label that encompasses technology tools with very different kinds of properties. Organizational functions need different AI applications heavily tailored to their own data and workflows. For example, while AI chatbot applications based on large language models can make customer service agents more productive for sales and service support functions, decision tree algorithms enable apps that simplify predictive maintenance work for service operations. Knowing what distinguishes these different AI technologies will be crucial for business leaders who own and continually refine processes.

AI applications are changing at a furious rate, and the C-suite expects business leaders to keep up with the related transformation opportunities that open up. For example, less than half a year after the popularization of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, French communications company Bouygues Telecom deployed generative AI tools in its customer service process, challenging company executives to rapidly understand the technology and how it differed from earlier AI. To meet expectations, executives don’t need to develop deep coding skills, but they do need a sound understanding of foundational AI principles.