AI: The Blind Leading The Blind
AI – what a mess. Executives and investors regularly refer to all advanced automation as “AI”, regardless of whether the technology in question refers to machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, natural language processing, computer vision / image recognition, voice recognition, generative AI and so on.
The good folks at Korn Ferry recently published the results of a survey of 240-plus CEOs as it relates to how those CEOs are positioning their companies for the “AI shift”. Companies have deployed machine learning and most other advanced automation technologies mentioned above for years. Therefore, I assume that Korn Ferry is referring specifically to Generative AI, a newer, creative form of advanced automation that we frequently write about.
What is interesting about the Korn Ferry survey is that the results show that the surveyed CEOs don’t know what they don’t know.
40% of surveyed CEOs are more concerned about their HR Department’s “AI-related knowledge and skills” as opposed to whether or not those companies have a cohort of employees with a deep knowledge of data (that’s a problem). For example, how to identify relevant enterprise data, how to cleanse it, how to label it, how to store it and so forth such that it may be leveraged in a specific, well-defined use case that may find its way into a production environment (80% of “AI” models do not make it to a production environment).
27% of surveyed CEOs are unsure about “the biggest obstacle to AI integration.” Hint: your uncertainty is the biggest obstacle.
See a portion of the Korn Ferry AI survey results below. A link to the full survey may be found HERE.
