AI for People and Business

Chapter 16. The Future of AI

At this point of the book, I hope that you’re inspired and ready to leverage AI within your organization guided by AIPB. In this chapter, I share some final thoughts on the importance of executive leadership, followed by an overview of AI trends and a look ahead at the future.

AI and Executive Leadership

If you are a senior-level executive, I would like to extend an extra thanks for reading this book. Why? Two reasons. First, executive leadership understanding and buy-in is critical to advancing AI initiatives as well as helping ensure initiative success. Second, because many senior executives become far removed from the areas they oversee in their business and rightfully become mostly concerned with strategy over tactics and subject matter expertise. For good reasons, businesses need people to own strategy, P&L, operations, and other executive-level responsibilities for the business and each function. There is a definite downside, however, to this removal and focus only on the 30,000 (or whatever thousand) foot view. It is often expressed as a need for an executive summary for everything.

It’s very important in my opinion for executive leadership to have an appreciable amount of subject matter expertise in areas core to the businesses offerings and respective lines of business. This is especially true in the case of AI, machine learning, and data science. These fields can be difficult for people to understand, and when decision makers are those who ...