AI and leaders

Before the pandemic, many young motivational speakers (including those who are not so young) gave an alarming call that technology will replace humans as we enter the 4th Industrial Revolution. Many were amused, more were entertained, and only a few were alarmed. They also cited studies and research findings from well known consultancy companies and academe how technology will take away our jobs. People in business reasoned, “manual labor in this country is still cheap compared to the developed ones, so technology will never replace workers.” There may be a grain of truth to this, but this view is shortsighted. There are, of course, other expense and cost items to consider but for specific industries, salaries and wages take the bulk of a business organization’s expense.

All these talks about the 4th Industrial Revolution before the pandemic are barely mentioned. Doing a little review to appreciate what it means would be good. In a nutshell, the First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. The Fourth is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has occurred since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. Addressing the elephant in the room and especially now that all the hype of generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications like ChatGPT will replace leaders, the question is, will it or not?

AI when appropriately used can and will replace some of the work leaders do daily.

People are usually scared of change. The tractor terrified farmers. The internet scared thousands of traditional businesses. Mobile phones, e-commerce sites, social media, and all those things did not replace humans; they helped optimize human productivity.

And so, technology did not replace humans. What has happened is that humans equipped with tools and the knowledge of technology usage replaced humans who do not.

Leaders can now use ChatGPT to replace trivial and repetitive work to generate more time to focus on our creativity and other things that require the human touch. One way to look at it is that AI is the new tractor. Technology will not replace leaders because AI does not possess qualities like resourcefulness and resilience. All the successful business people and effective leaders I have met in my lifetime possess the same qualities that technology can never produce. And even as smart as AI can get, and one day it can feign these qualities, it cannot replicate resilience, creativity and humility.

I wrote in this column a few weeks ago and gave an example of AI’s work. While it churned out pretty acceptable data, it was factual, flat, and boring because it does not have what philosophers call “soulfulness.”

Industry experts and marketing professionals will tell you that emotion and sentiment are huge parts of marketing. Without this quality AI will never be able to make a potential customer feel deep emotion about your brand. Only humans can do that.

In connection to marketing, one core competence of successful business or leadership, in general, is listening. AI is a robot, and it is not a therapist. It cannot pick up nuances and other variables in communication as humans do. Salespeople know that the ability to read someone’s body language effectively, for example, can be the difference between closing a deal and losing it. AI can only process what we feed it, and it cannot profoundly understand human psychology, and trust me, human psychology is everything in business. And finally, there is no trust between humans and AI.

As I often remind participants in my leadership seminars, where there is no trust, there is no leadership. Everything is play-acting, and people’s performance will never rise beyond the level of compliance. When performance is merely compliant and does not rise to excellence, the business would not have a competitive edge.

We need trust to build meaningful relationships, and we need those relationships to facilitate business transactions. No matter how smart AI will get to be, it will never have my trust.

This new tractor is here to stay and can become the leader’s best friend, researcher, and adviser if appropriately leveraged. And here is a fact. Even in the absence of technology, the stubborn, rigid jerk of a leader who does not deliver results will be replaced. They do not even need an AI to replace them; all they need is HR.

(Francis Kong’s podcast “Inspiring Excellence” is now available on Spotify, Apple, Google, or other podcast streaming platforms.)