Hey happy Monday!
This week I collected some notes between Turin and Oria.
When you are traveling, whether you are doing it for business or pleasure, it is not only your body that moves, but also your mind.
In this note you will find the most significant reflections.
All the images in this note were created by me with Midjourney.
If you like any of the steps take a screenshot and post it on Instagram – tagging @designstrtgy – or on LinkedIn mentioning my name or STRTGY.
The CEO of the future will be an AI
Turin Digital Days, May 9, 2023, 8 a.m. I am among the first to arrive at the Talent Garden at the Agnelli Foundation. The café is not yet open but the guy is kind enough to seat me anyway and make me an American coffee. I go over the slides I prepared. You can download them at this link.
Some will be at the event in person, others will watch it on streaming. I am told that they will soon make it available on YouTube for everyone. I will inform you as soon as that happens.
The point I want to bring to your attention is that I don’t think AI will eliminate jobs. History shows that it has never happened.
During the Industrial Revolution, workers thought that machines caused unemployment. This led to the labor movement called Luddism. Agriculture also suffered opposition to the use of machines, for example when laborers destroyed the first steam-powered threshers.
Looking at things in perspective, history shows instead that technology has always created jobs.
However, what is happening with AI leads one to reconsider who in the world of work will undergo the greatest transformation. Here are some thoughts that lead me to think that it will be the leadership of organizations that will be most profoundly impacted by it
“In 30 years, a robot will probably be on the cover of Time Magazine as the best CEO” – Jack Ma, 2017
In a 2017 interview, the founder of Alibaba made this prediction that is already coming true. In China to be exact. NetDragon Websoft replaced its CEO with an AI saving $16 million in compensation and improving its stock performance.
What does a good CEO do? Three things mainly: it shapes business, makes decisions and communicates them clearly. Three activities in which AI is already capable of achieving extraordinary results.
Jackson Greathouse Fall on Twitter posted this 22.6 MILLION-view thread in which he talks about how he gave ChatGPT a $100 budget to create a business and generate as much money as possible. Jackson merely continued the conversation with the bot and carried out the instructions given. In the thread you can follow the steps from niche identification to domain choice, from logo design to e-commerce setup to hiring your first real employee and performance review…generating revenue along the way. He called it HustleGPT.
With AutoGPT, Jackson’s work will not be necessary because this new AI model is capable of accessing the Web for input data, connecting to various applications, and performing tasks autonomously.
Augmented leadership
I admit the title was a bit clickbait, rather than being replaced, the CEO and his Leadership Team will be greatly facilitated by artificial intelligence. In the same way that employees and freelancers are already finding benefit in other fields such as writing, image generation, music, and design.
Strategy is the most important asset by which to strengthen one’s competitiveness.
Imagine the potential of working with OKRs and KPIs. Cycle after cycle, all you do is generate data with which to train artificial intelligence to build your business model and relate it to market and general data from around the world.
That is precisely where big data-capable companies are investing the most resources: in creating proprietary models to interpret their business and evolve it faster. At this link you can read Bain&Co’s press release announcing that it has formed an alliance with OpenAI to serve its clients among which the first to benefit will be The Coca-Cola Company.
“We see opportunities to enhance our marketing through cutting-edge AI, as well as explore ways to improve our business operations and capabilities.” – James Quincey, Chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company.
4 Areas of Acceleration through AI
I have identified four areas of acceleration
1 / Trends & Scenario Making
AI can process huge amounts of data and simulate the consequences of new market conditions on teams. Imagine a prompt like, “Analyze new law XYZ and write an action plan for each team in my company.”
2 / Investment and divestment.
AI can help better allocate invested resources with the ability to analyze business metrics in real time and create predictive models.
3 / Go to market
Teams can already use AI today to accelerate the design of their products. From design to coding – or structural construction calculations – via market research.
Did you know that in the JTBD Progress Revealed program I included a module to generate interview scripts, which are incredibly accurate, for user behavior analysis? Consider taking part in the next cohort. Click here to read about the program.
4 / Upskilling
We could use AI to identify skills gaps and develop specific training programs even predicting future skills required by the strategy.
AI will be provided by default in every enterprise software. Google Workspace-here you can find the page that was put up right after Google/IO a few days ago (May 2023)-and Microsoft 365 with its Intelligent Applications in the first place will enable immediate elevation of employee productivity.
The missing slide
There is a slide that I did not include that is actually more of a personal consideration after following this topic even on social where a great deal of prompts-the AI commands-are proliferating that are incredibly detailed and often verbose.
AI does not yet have mind reading… This forces a considerable amount of time to be invested in optimizing instructions in order to be understood by a machine and get quality output.
What if we invested that time to be just as clear with our flesh-and-blood employees?
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
-Antonio
