2019-07-01 The European Business Review

8 TheEuropeanBusinessReview July- August 2019

Organisations need to urgently take action

to address the communication and skills gap

between their corporate leaders, key decision

makersandAIdevelopers,inordertoreapthe

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intoanAI-competentorganisation.

W

hatliesattherootof thegapbetween

thepromiseof AIandthepracticeofan

AI–basedstrategy?Asrecentevidence-

basedinquirysuggests^1 , companieswidelyreport

thattheadoptionanduseofAItechniquessignif-

icantly lag the promise theywere led to believe

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productive. The answer is not technical. It is

organisational andcultural: Amassive skillsand

language gap has emerged between key organ-

isational decision makers and their ‘AI teams’.

It is a barrier to innovation in the workplace

that promises to stall,delay orsink algorithmic

innovationsforthenextdecadeormore.Andit is

growing, notshrinking.

TheSkillsGap.Hereis thecruxofit. Theskill

setsofthosein theupperechelonsoforganisations

areoutof syncwiththosecreating‘AIsolutions’:

• Executives know howtotalktootherpeople.
  6HHÀJXUH7KH\ KDYH FRPSOH[DQGZHOOKRQHG
  abilities for listening, empathising, deliberating,
  energising and de-energisingmeetings, emoting
  and reading others’ emotional landscapes and
  adapting their ways of being to seemingly
  intractablesocialsituations.


• Thosewhodevelopmachinelearningsolutions
  to business problems know how to talk to
  machines. They write pseudo-code and code,
  develop large scale platforms that scale to
  millions of users, aggregate data in multiple
  formatsfrommultiplesources,specifyandcode
  interfaces for users that incentivise them to
  interactwiththemachinestheybuildviacombi-
  nations of words, images,colors,haptics, and
  actionprompts.


• Developerswantclear,preciseinstructionsthatare
  easilytranslatableintocodeorpseudo-code;but–

Intelligent Artificiality:

WHY‘AI’ DOES NOT LIVE UP TO ITS HYPE – AND HOWTO

MAKE IT MORE USEFUL THAN IT CURRENTLY IS

BYMIHNEAMOLDOVEANU

Artificial Intelligence

A massive skills

and language

gap has emerged

between key

organisational

decision

makers and

their ‘AI teams’.

1. Sam Ransbotham, David Kiron, Philipp Gerbert and Martin Reeves, Reshaping

20&+"00&1%/1&Ɯ &)+1"))&$"+ ", MIT Sloan Management Review-BCG Report 59181.