Welcome to Future Tense. This column will answer the question of what aspects of AI a business manager should understand well to successfully apply it in their company.
So, I thought why not pose the same question to GPT-3, a state-of-the-art AI language model for text generation. I left out the irrelevant parts of the AI responses and strung together the good bits into this article. See for yourself whether AI gets it right or not.
The question posed to GPT-3 — What should a business manager understand to successfully apply AI?
AI can be thought of as the most advanced form of automation available to us today. A business manager needs to understand what AI is, and how it works. They need to understand why they should use it, in what context they should apply it, and how to implement it successfully.
I believe that a business manager should understand AI very well in order to apply it successfully. I am not referring here to the specific implementation of AI in a particular company or industry, but rather an understanding of what AI is and how it works.
I would say that the most important areas to understand are:
- Why and how AI will change the business world, and what businesses can do to prepare
- How to embrace and foster positive social change
- How to manage the challenges and opportunities that AI creates for employees
- How to manage the challenges and opportunities that AI creates for customers
- How to manage the challenges and opportunities that AI creates for society
Onboarding AI
I would describe AI as the simulation of human intelligence by machines, especially computer systems. AI is a set of technologies that enable machines to act intelligently and make decisions based on the perceived situation, enabling them to perform tasks in an automated way.
Artificial intelligence is usually broken into sub-fields such as machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. Within these fields are many techniques that can be used for different purposes. It is important to understand how AI works and what it does, as well as its limitations. However, the business manager should also realise that while artificial intelligence can help manage a company's operations more efficiently than humans alone, there are some things that are simply better left to human management.
A tool, not the master
It is important to understand that AI systems are not conscious, nor do they have emotions or feelings. They are machines that perform tasks in an automated way. For example, an AI program can be given a list of all words that exist in the English language, but it would not know what those words mean because it has no means of experiencing them by having senses. An AI system can be given a list of all physical laws such as gravity, and it can deduce what will happen when two blocks are dropped from different heights, but it cannot learn about physics by falling off the roof.
AI machines have very specific purposes and some tasks they can complete far better than humans. These include things like correlation analysis, where you need to do a lot of calculations in order to find the main factors affecting something, or even just finding patterns that are otherwise overlooked by people.
Working with AI in synergy
AI can also help you understand and predict massive amounts of data that would be impossible for humans to digest by themselves. However, when it comes to using AI in business, the most important thing is understanding how your specific use case works. Also, it is important to remember that AI can never fully replace humans. While AI will be able to do a lot for your company, you need people who are capable of using the technology effectively and making adjustments as necessary.
In the end, AI will be able to help your company a lot by doing things that would normally require many people. However, when it comes to important decisions and other management issues, you should always remember that there are some things that only humans can do. AI is a tool. It is not, in itself, good nor bad. There is good and bad use of AI. The same as any other tool. The job of the business manager is to understand what AI can do for their company, and how best to use it. It's not magic or an incantation that will solve all of your problems for you.