If artificial Intelligence is to be a good match for management, senior leaders need to focus first on the human side of it and second on technology. Not the other way around. When businesses recognise the relative strengths of each player – human and machine – in the field, they can improve the effectiveness of management in order to boost their top and bottom lines. Taking advantage of each player’ strength, means senior leaders must rely on managers to design a new work organization. In this context, AI (Artificial Intelligence) will allow IA (Intelligence augmentation). AI will not “correct” bad management . Intelligence Augmentation induces indeed an initial intelligence to augment!
Future management will leave administration to artificial Intelligence : data gathering, planning, coordination, reports writings and control tasks will be performed by machine relying on its strengths : speed, accuracy, repetition, predictive capabilities, scalability. But AI will also amplify managers insight and intuition, creativity, improvisation, dexterity, judging, social and leadership abilities by leveraging data and analytics.
In future management, judgement work is still key
Many decisions require insight beyond what artificial intelligence can squeeze from data alone. Good managers will use their knowledge of organizational history and culture, as well as empathy and ethical reflection. This is the essence of human judgment — the application of experience and expertise to critical business decisions and practices. Managers have already a sense of a shift in this direction and identify the judgment-oriented skills of creative thinking and experimentation, data analysis as the top new skills that will be required to succeed in the future. Bad managers will, on the other hand, rely on AI to solve problems in order to automate all the possible management decisions. But In the world in which we all live, things are seldom clear-cut. The problems we face have multiple dimensions. In complex multidimensional decisions such as those faced by most managers, it is very unlikely that processes of straightforward analysis will clearly resolve the issue of what to do. Many decisions require insight beyond what artificial intelligence trained from data alone can do.
Good Managers will master how their brain work before using AI
They will understand that if good decisions were solely the result of intellectual capacity, then few mistakes would have been made in the corporate world. They will pay a renewed attention to the information process in the brain to get more of the machines. To process the information, we select it, we analyze it, we link it to other information, we remember it and we retrieve it. In many situations, from one information, we infer another by going beyond what we factually have. This inferential activity is so constant and present that we are not aware of it. Yet it lies as the basis of each of our judgments, each of our decisions or forecasts. Thanks to this processing, we reconstitute reality and use our knowledge. But we do not always reconstitute this reality, we sometimes rebuild it. This could be a cause of bad decisions. This is where AI will kick in. Its logical and probabilistic laws will have been designed to ensure the validity of our own reasoning (validity = adequacy between our conclusions, forecasts and judgments on the one hand and the reality of the other). Managers will use digital technologies to tap into the knowledge and judgment of partners, customers, and communities, they will be able to tease out and bring together diverse perspectives, insights, and experiences into integrated, workable, and appealing solutions, Then this partnership will guide managers to the next level of management added value and more subtle question: what are the correct indicators and what is the appropriate info to consider ? If you can find the facts that support virtually any decision, then your only concern is how to sort out and weigh the information you obtain. Good managers will understand that the main problem will become interpretation.
In the future, AI will available to any big company. Then competition will value the difference the best companies can offer: good human strategists. The big picture thinking remains one capability on which good managers are better than machines and can be the best with them.