Good morning. Peter Vanham writing from Geneva this morning. Could it be that for all the AI hype we’ve already had, some CEOs still haven’t understood how important it is to implement it across their organization, and how little time there is left to do so?
But those gains don’t come for free, he also warned. To reap them, you need to be serious about it in every part of the organization, starting at the top. And it’s here he is still often frustrated. “If the leader is not relentless about it,” Tangen said, “it won’t happen.”
Similarly, he said, you need “young, tech-savvy” ambassadors who experiment with AI at the base of your organization (and are given appropriate tools to do so); and middle management and compliance departments that act as enablers, rather than actors who stand in the way.
“Companies are turned upside down”, he said. “You see change coming from newly recruited people. In the past, middle managers had to disseminate information from the top. Now [their job] is to pull information from under, and make sure it goes up.”
In an environment where AI is everywhere, including in productivity figures, the time for laggards to catch up is running out. Tangen’s advice? “You just need to implement AI in everything you can. […] People don’t like change. You need to force them.”
