• Achieving better governance. If leaders integrate AI into risk management, and perhaps make it available as a tool for their risk committees, we could encourage more responsible decision making.
At critical mass, better decision-making should build organizational resilience, improve efficiency, and support more successful innovation. In an age of heightened geopolitical conflict, climate change, and great economic uncertainty, organizations of all persuasions should be considering AI as a powerful tool to improve our cognitive abilities and the potential for our futures. Of course, no tool can do this on its own— we need the skills to use the tool properly, interpret its findings, and implement them wisely.
So what will it take to develop and trust AI to look into the future for us? There are actions we must build into our algorithms, and others that we must foster in our workforces.
AI is a powerful tool to improve our cognitive abilities and the potential for our futures.
We must develop new skills, individually and organizationally
A forward-looking AI has the potential to provide us with information that, organizationally, we’ re not prepared for. If you know that there is a chance of failure in one specific part of your supply chain, how do you use that information to produce better organizational resilience? Do you have the right people, with the right skills, using the right processes to make data-driven decisions?
Questions such as these go well beyond the technical skills that dominate so many debates on the skills gap. Technical skills are relatively straightforward to identify, if difficult to hire for: facility with general-purpose programming languages such as Python, for example, strong mathematical and statistical foundations, machine learning, data analysis and visualization.
But we also need people who are experts at interpreting data, at critical thinking, and at solving problems and communicating. Institutions and organizations must prioritize the development of these skills, even when they don’ t neatly fit in the category of technical skills that organizations so often seek out. Without these interpretative, problemsolving, and communication skills, we can’ t design and implement efficient and ethical AI systems that can serve as accurate guides to the real world— or the almost-real future.
38 Bold ideas to power progress