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David De Cremer released his new book, “The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work,” last month.
Responsible business leaders need to adopt human-centered artificial intelligence approaches to ensure AI is turned into a value creator, says David De Cremer, Dunton Family Dean of Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business.
AI-savvy business leaders employ AI technologies as a conduit “to create business value for stakeholders,” De Cremer says. AI-savvy leadership goes beyond mere coding experiences and includes the ability to align AI comprehension with organizational purpose, including asking the right business questions and using a narrative that tech experts understand so they can answer those questions with the right technology and data.
The purpose of artificial intelligence, De Cremer says, is ultimately to “enhance human intelligence.”
De Cremer was named dean of the D’Amore-McKim School last year and officially installed as the Dunton Family Dean in March. He came to Northeastern from the National University of Singapore, where he was the provost chair and professor of management and organization in the Business School. He was born in Belgium and has lived and worked in Europe, United Kingdom, Middle East, Asia and the United States.
His new book, “The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work,” was released June 18.
In “The AI-Savvy Leader,” De Cremer says business leaders should explicitly integrate AI into their vision and be actively engaged in the AI adoption process rather than avoiding responsibility and delegating its execution to tech experts. The book is not about developing AI and mastering machine learning, but rather a guide for business leaders on how to lead Al adoption so the technology can be leveraged as a value creator across the board.
Northeastern Global News sat down with De Cremer. The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
I’m a behavioral scientist with a background in behavioral economics, social psychology and neuroscience. I’m not looking at the development of the technology itself. I’m looking at what the impact of artificial intelligence has on our society and businesses. Specifically, how will AI affect the way we operate as businesses, how the workflow dynamics will change, and how it will impact the workforce performance.
And this approach is needed because the psychology of artificial intelligence is an undervalued, yet important dimension that needs to be understood better to leverage AI successfully. Successful AI adoption is more than an engineering exercise where the tech aspects of AI are crucial, it is more about the behavioral change that is needed. Indeed, because whenever AI is involved, there’s also people who must use it.
A human-centered approach to AI is reflected in our school by identifying AI as a tool that business leaders must learn to work with. In essence, leadership is not going to change entirely now that AI has entered the business scene. In fact, the same leadership behaviors that were effective in the past, will still be the ones that will be effective now, with the difference that you need to lead today in ways that you can leverage both human and artificial intelligence.
With that wisdom in mind, leaders need to learn to be a facilitator of bringing people together to use AI in the tasks and processes that will foster more effective collaborations that uplift the entire workforce. At the same time, leaders also need to shape the work culture, so teams sign in and accept the use of AI. So, as a business school the message is clear: humans first and tech second, as turning AI into a value creator for your business depends more on understanding and working with the reactions of humans towards AI than the other way around.
When consulting for companies or teaching executives, I was repeatedly confronted with a reality where business leaders were uncertain about what their future would look like. With AI moving into organizations, leaders are afraid that their business expertise and leadership will become irrelevant. They do not understand AI and believe that the future will belong to tech experts.
As a result, business leaders face the challenge to bring in this new technology that they do not understand, while at the same time having to adjust to it and leverage its supposed power to enhance organizational performance.
We need our business leaders to ask mission-critical questions more and at the same time make those questions comprehendible for the tech experts so they can use AI to generate predictions based on appropriate data analysis.
Garry and I met at a conference where we were both speakers and got talking. We stayed in touch, and we ended up writing several articles on the relationship between humans and AI. In 2021, we wrote an article that was published in Harvard Business Review, and was eventually selected as one of the best articles on AI that year. The article discusses the idea that the future of AI is not about replacing people, but more so about collaboration in the form of “Triple AI.”
We based “Triple AI” on the chess tournaments that he organized after he lost to the IBM computer Deep Blue in ’97. His loss to a computer made his critics say that the era of humans was over in the field of chess. Because of this he always jokes that he’s the first knowledge worker that lost his job to a computer.
He and I hooked up to analyze further why and how computers and humans can work together more efficiently. We came up with the idea of Triple AI to explain why truly collaborative forms of collaboration would create more optimal results. Triple AI reflects the existence of three types of intelligence: First, machine intelligence, which is artificial intelligence (AI1); second, human intelligence, which is authentic intelligence (AI2); and third, the combination of both, which we called augmented intelligence (AI3).
First, if you want a career in business, many recruiters still consider it a plus if you have an MBA. It adds credibility to your business ambitions and shows that you are willing to put the extra mile in it to achieve your goals. Second, an MBA obviously also brings other benefits that companies like. When doing an MBA you obtain a large network of other professionals and that will be a premium for the rest of your career.
Those interpersonal skills will only become more important in the future. It’s no coincidence that in today’s AI era, those are skills that are identified as uniquely human and crucial in making AI work for us in efficient ways.
So, I think an MBA will always remain popular, but I do think it’s time to be creative in how we deliver this MBA and recognize that today we are even more pressed by the market to show to a larger audience why an MBA could be valuable to them.