Still Trying to Sound Smart About AI? The Boss Is, Too

There’s a lot of “ready, fire, aim” in the industry right now as execs feel pressure to move on AI, even though most admit they don’t have confidence in how to use it. At The Wall Street Journal, Ray A. Smith rounds up some recent surveys that capture the situation:

Rarely has such a transformative, new technology spread and evolved so quickly, even before business leaders have grasped its basics.

No wonder that in a recent survey of 2,000 C-suite executives, 61% said AI would be a “game-changer.” Yet nearly the same share said they lacked confidence in their leadership teams’ AI skills or knowledge, according to staffing company Adecco and Oxford Economics, which conducted the survey.

The upshot: Many chief executives and other senior managers are talking a visionary game about AI’s promise to their staff—while trying to learn exactly what it can do.

Smith also points to a separate spring survey of 10,000 workers and executives that cited AI as a reason 71% of CEOs and two-thirds of other senior leaders said they had impostor syndrome in their positions.

With limited confidence at the top, AI innovation is trickling up from the bottom. (This rhymes with our strong belief at Big Medium that to be expert in a thing, you have to use the thing.)

In fact, much of what business leaders are gleaning about AI’s transformative potential is coming from individual employees, who are experimenting with AI on their own much faster than businesses are building bespoke, top-down applications of the technology, executives say.

In a survey of 31,000 working adults published by Microsoft last month, 75% of knowledge workers said they had started using AI on the job, the vast majority of whom reported bringing their own AI tools to work. Only 39% of the AI users said their employers had supplied them with AI training.