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Leaders,
AI is all the buzz…but what is the practical application of AI for every leader? According to Arvind, GM at Wipro, a leading global digital transformation consultancy, the practical application is that in the next 5 years, there will be a fundamental disruption in the value of intelligent labor.
This disruption will impact everything – including your job, your team structure, and your company structure. Here’s a quick example from Arvind. Competitive research that typically takes a week with a human team can take a couple hours with an AI agent.
We’ve already seen early examples of this through the freelance economy. Whether individuals choose to work as fractional CMO’s, COO’s, etc instead of continuing on the corporate ladder. Or companies embracing freelancers as a strategic sourcing channel to drive outcomes like North America’s leading motorcycle manufacturer leveraging over 30 freelancers to build their collaborative riding mobile application. Or companies like Intuit creating TurboTax Live, a standalone feature made possible by building freelancer talent pools.
Arvind will help us understand early examples of success with AI, describe use cases we can all apply now, and show us how tools like ChatGPT can generate brainstorming ideas.
He will also give us a 4 step process we can apply to start embracing AI:
- Step 1: Change our mindset
- Step 2: Scope what can be done
- Step 3: Leverage Data
- Step 4: From Pilot to Production
Our Favorite Quotes
What comes to mind first thing in the morning?
- “As I learned more and more about AI, its capabilities, technology, and our aspirations for this technology, the question I wake up with these days is, how do I and my team and my company remain relevant? That’s the number one question. Because if you’re not thinking about that, then there’s a high possibility you’re gonna be left behind in the next couple of years.”
Example of how AI can replace human intellectual labor
- “Let’s say that I had to do a competitive analysis coming out of business school in 2016. I would go through multiple websites, talk to multiple people, and finally I would boil down the 10-15 competitors in the market down to some form of a visual or an excel sheet or something that compares each competitors, strengths, weaknesses etc. A human would would require, I would say on average, one week to go do a job like that. Today, if I work with ChatGPT, the same comparative analysis, I can do it in about 1-2 hours.”
- “Now, does it mean that humans are going to go away and strategists are going away? No, that’s not the case because I’ll most probably see something within the competitor analysis that today at least AI will not be able to see. I’m quite confident about that. However, 90% of the work that I have to do to get there, today AI can do.”
Top roadblocks Arvind believes are in the way of leaders unlocking the true potential of AI
- “I would say the first roadblock is mindset and understanding of the technology. So I think the VP needs to be open to the idea that their team, their function, their product, and their service could be disrupted by this technology.”
- “The second hurdle is figuring out what to do. There’s so much information out there and so many different ways you can leverage it.”
- “Do you have the data needed to train that AI model?”
“There are a lot of pilot projects that people are able to do, but to actually take something into production is very hard, right? To be able to know that product or service is reliable, it’s trained on the right data, and it’s consistently deployable.”
What is the main thing you want our listeners to take away from this episode?
- “The next five years are going to be very disruptive. And being agile and constantly asking this question of, how do I remain relevant or how do I add new relevance in the world, I think should be on everybody’s mind.”
