“Maybe it’s a good time to put some intelligence around your artificial intelligence strategy!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
I built a new little microsite through the weekend – give it a look at https://jimcarroll.ai
Why did I do this? Because it’s becoming pretty clear, pretty fast, that there is so much FOMO-driven momentum around AI right now that CEOs and senior executives are quickly coming to get to the ‘WHY’ of the AI-related action plans they are hearing from excited staff.
“WHY are we doing this?”
The page intro captures the essence of what I’ve been thinking:
The acceleration of AI is not just about technology.
It’s also about the promise and the peril, the opportunity and the challenge, the disruptive impact and the strategy. It’s about leadership.
Futurist Jim Carroll – one of the most respected leadership speakers in the world – puts these realities into perspective for those organizations that require a highly customized, industry-specific overview.
This goes back to a post I made a few weeks ago – AI should not just be about the technology (which is darned exciting!) but even more about the strategy. I hit my virtual broadcast studio yesterday to share my thoughts on this while announcing my new site. (As an aside, I built the site using a wonderful little service called Carrd.co. It’s basically a drag-and-drop website builder. Choose from one of the dozens of templates; drag in some photos, set up your text, and deploy. I’m a HUGE fan of the service – here’s a referral link if you decide to explore it.)
Bottom line? CEOs and senior leadership teams – and associations and others – don’t need someone to explain to them the intricacies of large-language models, the details of how ChatGPT works, the science of machine learning technologies, or the technical layers of an AI system.
What they do need is strategic insight. There’s a lot going on, but what they really need to be thinking about is:
- what are the strategic implications of AI, right now, and going forward?
- specifically, how will AI affect my industry?
- in greater detail, what impact will these new AI technologies have on my company or association?
- what new strategic opportunities might exist?
- what complex new challenges might it present me with?
- what skills issues are emerging that I need to start thinking about now?
- what disruptive transformation might occur?
- what is the possibility for the emergence of new competitors that are building on that disruption?
- what barriers do I have in the way that might hold me back from investigating it?
- what experience and skill set should I be building?
In other words – it’s not AI that matters, it’s your strategic thinking around its emergence. It’s always been bubbling around us, and yet now, is suddenly real. With that in mind, I’ve been sending this outline to those clients who have been asking me for an overview of how I might approach the AI topic within a keynote or leadership meeting:
- a highly customized overview of the impact of AI on the industry based on up-to-the-minute detailed research
- a short history of AI – a tour of what history has predicted and what has happened
- an outline of the current state of AI – the acceleration, innovation, and disruption!
- the strategic opportunities that exist with AI within your industry and organization, on a near, medium, and long-term basis
- the significant challenges and risks that exist for the same time frame
- an outline of what leading innovators and competitors are doing to align with these fast-moving trends
- a concise strategic plan for your organization and team, complete with actionable steps
My key point is that organizations need to align fast-moving AI trends to key strategic goals, and to that point the Web site notes that:
“I help CEOs, senior executives, and association leaders align their strategic objectives to the rapid acceleration of AI within a fast-paced keynote or leadership meeting presentation. It’s based on customized research specific to your industry and organization, and aligned to your unique perspective. It’s insight that matters, is relevant, and actionable!”
In the video, I go on to point out that while there are a lot of massive new developments right now, in many industries AI technologies have long had a profound impact, and are already showing a lot of strategic potential. You need to dig beneath the surface in order to get incise into what is happening the promise and the peril, the opportunities and the challenges. That can be very difficult to do in such a fast-moving world – but entirely necessary.
It’s also important to consider that the impact of today’s suddenly fast acceleration of AI will see an even greater acceleration of the major trends that I’m covering in my BIG Future series – which involves such things as a faster move to a world of 24-hour farming; an acceleration of precision, targeted medicine; greater speed in shifting the insurance world to real-time actuarial and risk analysis; and further automating the construction industry through faster deployment of automated, AI-driven construction robotic technology. That’s what strategic insight and analysis is all about – how are these trends now changing and evolving?
Bottom line? There’s a lot of FOMO driving AI at this moment in time – things are happening so fast! – but FOMO without strategy never ends up well! For me, this is all like 1993 all over again, when the World Wide Web exploded and everyone was rushing about to get a Web site, but no one was really articulating the WHY.
If you haven’t defined the WHY, you aren’t doing it right.
And so you need a little more intelligence behind your artificial intelligence strategy.
I’m eager to help!
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