Navigating the AI Revolution: Everything Old is New Again, Part 1

AI Landscapes: Redefining Commerce, Careers, and Communities - Article 1 of 8

The key to successfully navigating any technological disruption is to embrace adoption as soon as the disruption begins. Yet, with AI, hesitation persists. Many current leaders, having witnessed the advent of the Internet, email, and smartphones, are now grappling with technology fatigue. Across multiple organizations, we see leadership teams unsure of the next steps, frontline staff worried for their jobs, and the explosion of AI solutions all make knowing what to do challenging.

Although AI has been around since at least the 50s, it has exploded now for three reasons. First, the gaming community drove advances in processing power (hardware). Second, gaming pushed the change from CPUs to GPUs – relying on vectors to produce lifelike worlds and scenes. (Thank you, Grand Theft Auto!). Lastly, the evolution of a small number of large companies that dominate technology has provided the ability to invest in the further development of AI. This toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube and it shouldn’t. The worst AI will ever be is right now.

This series will explore four steps we believe you should be taking – now.

Diagnose and Futurecast: AI isn’t coming. It’s here. Involve your staff – especially those in roles with a lot of human capital – in assessing use cases to boost their knowledge of what is possible and demystify the nature of the change. We now know enough to futurecast roles and understand what they will look like in an AI-enabled world. We can be precisely wrong but directionally accurate about the next five years to develop a plan for how our workforce will change.

Reskilling Human Capital: This country has never experienced a technological shift against a declining labor force. Add to this that AI-experienced resources you might want to acquire will be limited and in very high demand. Just like back in Y2K, hiring your way out of this change will be hard. We must embrace a skills-based understanding of future roles and alternative paths for impacted people.

Content, Education, and Change Management: Change management was huge in the 1990s, and it’s time this discipline came back into fashion. We’ll discuss why acting to control the narrative is crucial and share some ways to do this effectively.

Reimagined Operating Models: All past disruption winners could reimagine a product or service leveraging technology to change the dominant operating model of the day. Uber & Lyft with taxis and Netflix with video streaming are great examples of changed operating models equating to success. We’ll explore how this can be done in a way that reduces risk and can provide speedy returns.

Look out for our next article to explore what we mean by futurecasting roles. Thanks for reading. Let’s talk AI implementation. Send me a note at wade@batonglobal.com.
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About Wade Britt‍

Wade Hampton Britt, IV is a partner and the Managing Director at Bâton Global. He has lived and worked in a dozen countries in the global express and edtech sectors before joining Bâton Global in 2016. Wade is passionate about helping clients and their communities navigate the AI disruption better than previous technological changes.