CEOs want their companies to adopt AI. But do they get it themselves?

Economic Times

3 hours ago

ETtech In March, Andy Katz-Mayfield, cofounder of the razor brand Harry's, started inviting junior employees to monthly meetings usually reserved for his most senior leaders. The purpose was for lower-level workers to show off how they were using generative artificial intelligence to improve the supply chain, finance and marketing.
But Katz-Mayfield had another purpose, too: getting the top executives comfortable with using AI themselves.
"Building familiarity with these tools opens people's eyes," said Katz-Mayfield, who is also a CEO of Harry's parent company, Mammoth Brands. "Through demos and stuff, people are like: 'Oh, that's cool. I didn't think about that, but I now realize why this is important for my team.'" Executives refer to the promise of AI with grandiose comparisons: the dawn of the internet, the Industrial Revolution, Carl Friedrich Gauss' discovery of number theory. But while boards and top executives may mandate using AI to make their businesses more efficient and competitive, many of those leaders haven't fully integrated it into their own workdays. As with most technological advances, younger people have taken to AI more quickly than their elders. And the work that people do earlier in their careers -- inserting data into spreadsheets, creating decks, coming up with designs -- also lends itself to playing around with the technology. Top executives, on the other hand, are often several steps removed from the mechanics. Once they're in the C-suite, days are filled with meetings. Less doing, more approving. So to nudge high-level managers, CEOs who have fully embraced AI are trying new tactics. Some have told senior leaders to use Gemini, Google's AI assistant, before defaulting to Google search. Some are carving out time at corporate retreats to play around with generative AI tools like Creatify. At Mayer Brown, a law firm in Chicago, chair Jon Van Gorp has shared with the partners how he uses a generative AI tool built for legal professionals to help draft contracts and distill the most salient points from his own writing. At a fashion startup called Daydream, Friday lunches are devoted to employees' sharing how they're using generative AI tools; the chief technology officer has shared her Gemini prompts from the week. Mammoth's chief technology officer, Sandeep Chouksey, 41, is well aware of AI and has been playing around with ChatGPT since it came out nearly three years ago. But he found that watching the engineers on his team helped him understand the technology better. He figured his peers needed to get their eyes on it, too, and suggested inviting employees who were working closely with AI to the leadership meetings. The work of senior executives "doesn't lend itself to actually experimenting with the technology," Chouksey said. "I knew that the other leaders needed to see what I was seeing -- all the bottom-up work that was happening."
Did you test that with ChatGPT?
Chuck Whitten is witnessing how company executives are gradually wrapping their heads around the AI phenomenon. He is the global head of digital practices at Bain & Co., a management consulting firm where his job is to advise CEOs about technology. They understand the importance of integrating AI into their companies, he said, but don't yet have a feel for the technology itself. He was in their shoes not too long ago. In 2021, he left Bain after 22 years to become co-chief operating officer at Dell Technologies. He was in that job when ChatGPT rolled out. He describes it as a "lightning bolt" moment. Part of the reason he returned to Bain was realizing that senior leaders needed assistance entering the "golden age of artificial intelligence," he said. "I think the majority that I see are just experimenting with the basics, sort of trying Copilot or ChatGPT for the occasional email, draft or quick fact check," Whitten said. "This is not a tool you can delegate down the hall to the chief information officer. They need to be hands-on in both where the technology is going and how they can apply it today." According to a survey of 456 CEOs by Gartner, a research and advisory firm, released in May, 77% of the executives thought AI is transformative for business, but fewer than half thought their technology officers were up to the task of navigating the current digital landscape.
Every CEO is trying to "figure out whether they're set up for the future or not and how the world looks on the other side of this technology transformation , " said Tom Pickett, CEO of Headspace, a wellness app. "They're facing this constant change, which just leads to stress and everyday anxiety." Pickett, 56, has dealt with his own anxiety by using AI chatbots as much as possible. He joined the company last August and said chatbots had helped him get up to speed in his role. He uses ChatGPT or Gemini to do research and receive advice about business moves, such as potential partnerships with other companies. He said it helped him "learn 10 times as much or test 10 times as many ideas in a very lightweight way." In the past, he said, "I would have had to ask the resident expert or somebody who worked with that company to really give me a debrief," Pickett said. "And instead, in five minutes, I'm like, 'Oh, OK, I get this.'" (He said he had also consulted people in his company, but now "the conversations are more productive.") Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice, a human resources software platform, said it can be difficult to get executives to use new tools, and in internal meetings she regularly asks, "Did you test that message with ChatGPT?"
Franklin, who previously was chief marketing officer at Salesforce, has been using generative AI tools since they came on the market. But the technology is moving quickly, and everyone is trying to figure it out on the go. "Nobody has 10 years of agentic AI experience right now. They at best have six months. So nobody is fully prepared," Franklin, 49, said. "What we have right now in the world is a lot of optimism combined with a lot of FOMO."
Tinkerers in the C-suite Fear of missing out can be the mother of innovation, it seems.
In January, Greg Schwartz, CEO of StockX, was scrolling the social platform X when he saw several users posting projects that they had made with various AI coding apps. He downloaded the apps. He hadn't written a line of code in years. But using the apps got his mind racing. During a corporate retreat in March, he decided to push 10 senior leaders to play around with these tools, too. He gave everyone in the room, including the heads of supply chain, marketing and customer service, 30 minutes to build a website with the tool Replit and make a marketing video with the app Creatify. "I'm just a tinkerer by trait," Schwartz, 44, said. "I thought that was going to be more engaging and more impactful than me standing in front of the room." There was a "little bit of shock" when he presented the exercise, he said. But he tried to remind people it was a fun activity. They weren't being graded. Their discomfort is normal, said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and author of the newsletter One Useful Thing and the book "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI." "AI is weird and off-putting," Mollick said. "There's a lot of psychological resistance to using the systems even for people who know they should be doing it." Many organizations, he added, have a "real failure of imagination and vision" when it comes to the power of these systems. "The main issue is that leaders have to take a leading role," Mollick said. "They all say AI is the future, use AI to do stuff. And then they don't make any decisions or choices." About half of companies do not have road maps for integrating AI, according to a Bain survey. Whitten at Bain said that about only 20% of companies were scaling their AI bets and that most didn't have benchmarks for how workers should use AI. At Mammoth Brands, Katz-Mayfield said that he and his team had discussed providing incentives to employees who use AI but that they hadn't needed to. The energy around experimenting is working for the company. In the last meeting it had five demos on the docket but didn't get to all of them because senior leaders were "asking so many questions and wanting to see different things." "If the leadership team is excited and engaged in that stuff," Katz-Mayfield said, "that's probably more than half the battle." Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. 3 years on, Akasa's next challenge: Staying in the air against IndiGo's dominance
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