In an era where technology is driving the need for transformation at an unprecedented pace, traditional leadership models demand a profound evolution.
Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI: A Guide to Creating Your Future as Leader, Follower, and AI Ally is the latest addition to the renowned Innovative Leadership series. Authored by a team of experts in the field, this book is poised to revolutionize how leaders and followers navigate the dynamic landscape of leadership in the age of artificial intelligence.
Key Highlights of Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI include:
• Leadership Skills for the Future: Readers will gain access to practical tools, knowledge, and strategies that empower them to take their leadership skills to the next level and co-create the future.
• Technological Synergy: The book illuminates how leaders can effectively collaborate with intelligent systems to make informed and ethical decisions, embracing the full potential of AI.
• The New Followership: Leaders can strengthen their relationship with their followers by understanding the dynamics between leadership and followership.
• Ethical Implications: Leaders are equipped to navigate the complex ethical considerations of leading in an AI-driven world, addressing several issues, including algorithmic bias issues and hallucinations.
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Meet Lynn, a Customer Service Representative at ACME Corporation. Lynn’s manager is Riley, an AI (artificial intelligence) bot. Riley listens to all of Lynn’s calls in real time and provides instantaneous guidance and performance feedback. Lynn is part of the next-generation workforce and appreciates Riley’s management style because Riley provides the deep engagement and constant interaction that Lynn craves to feel as a contributing member of the team. Now, meet Pat, the human manager of Riley and a team comprised of humans and AI bots. As a second-line manager, Pat has management and leadership responsibilities to the downline reports to direct their work and inspire them towards ACME corporate goals. It is not easy when people have a variety of motivators and AI bots, well, none save what they have been trained to do.
Sound like an exciting future?
Surprise, surprise, this is very much the present. Everything described already exists. And, yes, AI systems are directing human work…and yes, human managers are directing AI “employees.”
We live in a time of rapid change, with tools that can cause a massive impact (both positive and negative). As a result, traditional leadership styles are too slow and disengaging for the workforce. Moreover, with the increasing pressure to build innovative teams and intrapreneurial cultures, leaders face the dual challenge of honing their skills and teams without many proven models to rely upon. To make life even more complicated, today’s leadership is faced with learning to manage and lead in a post-COVID world that requires managers to assess performance and steward employee well-being. Furthermore, leaders are also expected to be JEDI champions: facilitators of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace.
This is why we need books like this one on Innovative Leadership. Historically, people were thrust into management and leadership roles based on their non-supervisory work performance. More rigorous leadership programs were developed as business advanced to help prepare people for this transition. However, change has outpaced the curriculum development. Today’s leaders must understand the ever-evolving workforce and new transformative technological tools like artificial intelligence. Like it or not, the demands of today’s employees expect you to be ready (and that includes those AI bots), and there’s not a lot of time or patience for leadership to adjust and be effective.
Thankfully, while you may not need to worry about AI employees in the very near future, we do have some powerful AI and other emerging technology tools to support us as we shift into Innovative Leadership. From a data perspective, 2 leaders and managers have many data points to assess work performance. In the case of Lynn, we have our traditional metrics of wait time, resolution time, the number of levels supported, and so forth. However, thanks to AI tools, we can also better assess customer satisfaction throughout the entire call, using the science of psychographics (psychology and personality assessment) and neurolinguistics (science of language and word choice). More importantly, AI can assess the real-time performance of Lynn (or any other employee) as they interact with the customer. Depending on how the call progresses, the AI will provide instantaneous feedback and coaching to the employee to maximize the opportunity of a beneficial outcome for the call. That’s a level most managers cannot do with a single employee, let alone an entire team. More importantly, the insight the AI provides into employee performance is the most important for a leader to gauge employee performance and maximize customer engagement.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for leadership regarding tooling. The ability for introspection and honest, constructive feedback for leaders is critical. Getting this input, though, is challenging. This is where AI presents another boon for leaders: the honest assessment of leadership skills. As we move forward, there isn’t a single prototypical leader. We have different archetypes (the nine types of leaders as you will read in this book) based upon the ten core skills (also shared in this book). AI tools help leaders fairly and accurately assess these capabilities. This is crucial to help us understand our strengths and weaknesses and which type of leader we are to maximize our strengths. As we understand what an innovative leader means, we also see how difficult it is to get honest feedback from our staff and colleagues. Artificial intelligence provides leadership with another trusted source of information (beyond employee performance) to help us become innovative leaders.
Moreover, as we look to the future of work, it’s not only enterprises wondering what the jobs and leaders of tomorrow must bring to the table. Government agencies are investing heavily to adjust their workforce development programs accordingly. Singapore has created the TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) initiative and AI Apprenticeship Program (AIAP) to provide the existing and future workforce with hands-on experience for these jobs of tomorrow. Canada has adopted Canada’s AI Augmented Workforce for their future work plan. The State of California has adopted an AI roadmap. The core tenants require full integration of AI skill development in K-12 and higher education curricula and a mandate to integrate AI tools to provide public services, including labor management and workforce development. That’s why management and leadership must be the first to understand and adapt to these changes because they will be the ones to lead the upcoming transformation of work.
To start leading your human and machine workforce soon, you must master ten critical skills. This book will share how to do that and essential frameworks to factor in contextual understanding and situational analysis. In essence, this book will serve as your sherpa as you enter the new world of Innovative Leadership. AI will be your leadership concierge so that you can maximize your effectiveness and support your employees in realizing their peak performance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neil Sahota (萨冠军) is an IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Advisor, author of the best-seller Own the AI Revolution, and a sought-after speaker. With 20+ years of business experience, he works to inspire clients and business partners to foster innovation and develop next-generation products/solutions powered by AI.
Thank you for reading Innovative Leadership Insights, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Ready to measure your leadership skills? Complete your complimentary assessment through the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn the 7 leadership skills required to succeed during disruption and innovation.
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Eric Redmond, a twenty-year veteran technologist and author, offers this article as a companion to his podcast Deep Tech: Demystifying the Breakthrough Technologies. The following article has been adapted from the Deep Tech book.
Artificial intelligence as a field has existed in one form or another for centuries, but only in the past decade or so has it reached the critical point of going mainstream. No longer confined to science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) is at work behind Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s search engine, and many other technologies we use every day.
These applications of AI, while exciting, are only the beginning. Over the next decade, we can expect AI to transform many industries, including these three: agriculture, manufacturing, and the military.
Now that the Pandora’s box of AI has been opened, there are very few fields that artificial intelligence won’t affect in the near future. We’ll never stop finding new ways to add intelligence to dumb processes or inanimate objects.
With this transformation comes the chance to invest in and adopt these new technologies, but to seize the opportunity, you’ll have to first understand what to expect from the shifting landscape of industries.
Industry #1: Agriculture
The first industry worth exploring in relation to the rise of artificial intelligence is agriculture. Historically the largest industry, agriculture has long been in the crosshairs of innovative technologies. From plowshares to cotton gins to factory farming and GMOs, each innovation seems to increase yield and decrease the number of people required to work in this grueling sector. The influence of AI is expected to be no different.
One way AI will reduce required labor is through monitoring of soil and crop conditions and targeted deployment of solutions. For example, John Deere announced the acquisition of a company that leverages machine-learning vision systems to automatically spray weed killer directly onto plants, reducing herbicide use by 90 percent.
Several other companies, such as ecoRobotix, are creating chemical-free, mechanical weed-pulling robots. Many of these robots are also capable of targeted insecticide deployment, helping stave off many of the unintended consequences of overspraying, such as bee colony collapse. And speaking of bees, there’s now a pollinating robot called BrambleBee. Furthermore, nearly 90 percent of crop losses are due to weather-related events, and the task of weather prediction is tailor-made for big data and machine learning.
Monitoring all the details of million-hectare farmlands is daunting work for humans yet perfect for machines, which is why you can expect to see a massive intersection between AI and agriculture in the coming decade.
Industry #2: Manufacturing
Next, let’s take a high-level look at how AI will impact manufacturing. Even in the early 1950s, automation was taking over manufacturing tasks in Henry Ford’s automobile factories. Our collective and persistent fear of automation goes back even further—just look at the Luddites of 1811, who famously destroyed high-tech cotton mills.
It’s true that automation, along with outsourcing, has contributed to a decrease in manufacturing jobs in first world nations. Still, over 8 percent of Americans earn a living in the manufacturing industry, which is over 11 percent of US GDP. Much of the technology needed to automate the remaining jobs currently exists: robotic arms, logistics machinery, quality control systems, and the like. So how will AI change things?
The introduction of AI into manufacturing takes automation to the next level by turning expensive specialty robots into general purpose cobots, or collaborative robots. Rather than huge, clunky welding robots, blind to the world and programmed for a narrow range of tasks, cobots can be taught many different tasks, retooling themselves automatically.
Cobots are also aware of their surroundings, capable of working side by side with humans on complex tasks. This allows cobots to slowly ease their way into a workspace and take over more work, limited only by an exponentially growing intelligence. Cobots may not be able to do all tasks, but they can do enough to bend that 8 percent of jobs down a few points while reducing waste, cost, and overhead.
Industry #3: Military
Lastly, artificial intelligence will undoubtedly transform the military. For the military, AI poses a siren song that’s too attractive to ignore: perfect knowledge of world events from governments to battlefields, paired with robots that bend the casualties on your side toward zero.
AI can better support troops by improving training systems and creating novel curricula for war games. It can provide smart weapons and better intelligence, along with the more pedestrian benefits of industry, like optimizing logistic challenges in the world’s most challenging situations, or helping troops with maintenance tasks.
Autonomous weapons are increasingly augmented with AI, such as smart-camera-controlled tactical missiles. Even if control ultimately remains in human hands, the myriad of complexities that would take humans years to learn can be partially automated, allowing operation from fewer specialist hands, like flying attack drones. Moreover, the ability to correctly detect targets can drastically reduce collateral damage and innocent deaths.
These are only a few straightforward examples and may not even scratch the surface of the many uses for AI in the military. At the very least, increasing automation may allow countries to shrink their military budgets in favor of more civilian expenditures.
The Time to Invest in AI is Now
I’ve only scratched the surface of how AI will transform agriculture, manufacturing, and the military, and as you can see, the potential uses for the technology are myriad. Artificial intelligence is already making an impact on our daily lives and most profitable industries, and its influence will continue to grow.
Even if you don’t work directly in tech, now is the time to get involved in the AI revolution. Historically, the people and companies that profit the most from emerging technologies are the ones who adapt and invest in them early. Moreover, these early adopters drive further adoption of the technologies, forcing everyone else to catch up.
You can get involved by learning more about how artificial intelligence will transform your industry, whether you work in agriculture, manufacturing, the military, or practically any other industry—AI is coming to disrupt them all. Prepare to be the first among your competitors to implement new AI solutions in your business, and like Amazon, Apple, and Google, you’ll position yourself to win.
For more advice on emerging technologies, you can find Deep Tech on Amazon.
About the Author
Eric Redmond is the Forrest Gump of technology: a twenty-year veteran technologist who always happens to show up wherever deep tech history is being made, from the first iPhone apps to big data to Bitcoin. He has advised state and national governments, Fortune 100 companies, and groups as varied as the World Economic Forum and MIT Media Lab. He has also authored half a dozen technology books (including two tech books for babies) and spoken on every continent except Antarctica. Today, he’s a husband, a dad, and the leader of a global tech innovation team.
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