Daily Inspiration: AI & Leadership – “You don’t need to know how AI works. You need to know about its impact and opportunities!”

“You don’t need to know how AI works. You need to know about its impact and opportunities!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I’m down in Fort Worth, Texas this morning; after lunch, I’ll speak to several hundred retail and supply chain executives about the future impact and opportunities of AI in their industry sectors. I’m here at the invitation of BNSF, the rail and logistics company – it’s a Warren Buffet company!

The keynote is heavily customized to trends in those sectors but is heavily modeled on my AI Megatrends keynote – i.e. not a lot around ChatGPT and other large language model technology, but more on robotics, last-mile delivery technology, warehousing, and autonomous vehicle tech, deep data analysis and more. Considering that Amazon sets the pace in this industry, and has deployed a lot of AI-based drone technology, a lot is going on!

This is all built around my AI for Leadership Teams keynote framework too:

While people want to know how to use all the emerging day-to-day AI tech – chatting with documents, new forms of search engine use, and such – they seem more eager to understand the medium and long-term trends that are at play here.

And while I’ve seen many other speakers focusing on ChatGPT and such, they seem to be spending too much time explaining how ChatGPT works, and not enough time on what are the broad disruptive impacts of all this fast-moving technology. How will it change the competitive landscape? What cost savings, efficiencies, and workflow restructuring opportunities exist for me? What will be the real impact of advanced warehouse robotics technology on my ability to support the vast shifts that continue to occur with omnichannel retail – ie how can I get the goods into and out of my warehouse faster?

They need to understand these impacts and opportunities to understand how to link AI to their existing and evolving strategies and plans – they don’t need to implement AI for AI’s sake. My keynote will give them a roadmap as to how to start thinking about that.

It should be fun!