61 Percent of Csuite Execs Lack Confidence In Their AI Skills, Knowledge

Csuite executives know AI and generative AI are important - but the two related technologies have developed so quickly that few leaders have much knowledge, background or skill in using them, let alone understanding the strategic implications for their organizations. Over 70% of senior level executives confess to suffering from 'imposter syndrome' as they exhort their staffs to do more with AI, faster, even as they themselves struggle to figure it out. 

The result can be a corrosive, mutual lack of confidence in leadership between the most senior execs, middle managers and the rest of the employee base. But successful leaders recognize that AI is new to almost everyone in the organization, that it requires a collaborative approach if implementation is to be effective - rather than a waste of resources - and that a humble focus on learning by doing rather than pretending to be a master of the new technology is the best way to optimize its use. JL

Ray Smith reports in the Wall Street Journal:

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. Business leaders’ confidence in their executive teams was at its lowest point in three years. AI’s rapid evolution was a big factor in the decline. A survey also cited AI as a reason 71% of CEOs and two-thirds of other senior leaders said they had “impostor syndrome” in their positions. 61% of Csuite executives said in a survey they lacked confidence in their leadership teams’ AI skills or knowledge. Generative AI “is not something you just hand over to the IT team and they can figure it out,” Mastering AI’s strategic potential “requires deep collaboration and alignment across the C-suite.”

Michelle Winterfield was gearing up to launch Tandem, an app focused on helping couples manage their finances. Then ChatGPT hit the internet. Her initial reaction: Yikes.

“Oh my gosh, this isn’t a skill I have,” the Chicago-based startup CEO and co-founder recalls thinking at the point a year and a half ago when the world first witnessed the power of generative AI. “Is this, like, the prerequisite now to have a successful company?”

Tandem co-founder and CEO Michelle Winterfield PHOTO: JENNIFER WOODWARD/CAPTURED COUTURE

The potential of artificial intelligence isn’t just flummoxing tech entrepreneurs. Chances are your boss is standing at the base of the learning curve, too—right next to you. 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. 

That can take some finessing. Chuck Rose, creative director at Publicis Sapient, a consulting firm specialized in helping businesses through digital transformations, says he sometimes has to acknowledge to his four-person team that he is uncertain how generative AI will evolve. “There is always a new feature,” he says.

The challenge presented itself during a recent presentation in which he was showing his team how to use generative AI tools to create video imagery for a client’s communications work.

“Some of the techniques I am demonstrating have changed since creating this presentation two weeks ago, but that is to be expected,” he told them, reminding the team that constant learning was the firm’s ethos. 

Fueling ‘impostor syndrome’

The advent of the internet and social media put similar pressure on senior business leaders. Yet even those technological advances didn’t match generative AI’s potential to reinvent business processes and jobs so rapidly and comprehensively, says Constantine Alexandrakis, chief executive of executive search and advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates. 

 

“That’s not something you just hand over to the IT team and they can figure it out,” he says. Rather, mastering AI’s strategic potential “requires deep collaboration and alignment across the C-suite.”

In a survey this year of more than 4,000 board members, CEOs, C-suite leaders and other senior executives, Russell Reynolds found that business leaders’ confidence in their executive teams was at its lowest point in three years. AI’s rapid evolution—along with economic and geopolitical uncertainty—was a big factor in the decline. A spring survey of 10,000 workers and executives by organizational consulting and executive search firm Korn Ferry also cited AI as a reason 71% of CEOs and two-thirds of other senior leaders said they had “impostor syndrome” in their positions.

“They’re uncertain about the impact, they’re grappling with how not to fall behind,” says Mark Arian, CEO of Korn Ferry’s consulting business. “It’s hard not to feel like an impostor.”

 

Executive coach Alisa Cohn recalls one CEO client whose team was pushing him to address AI’s implications for the company. “He kept telling his executives that they were exaggerating,” she says. 

She advised he take a different tack: Ask the team why AI was a threat and what the company should do about it. The CEO held a series of one-on-one conversations with staffers, then a group discussion.

“That turned into a working group, which turned into a new product,” Cohn says.

Bottom up, not top down

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.

Conner Reilly aims to boost his AI knowledge. PHOTO: CONNER REILLY

“On my list this year is to get more knowledgeable in AI because it’s being brought up more and more,” says Conner Reilly, a vice president of customer success at a personality-data platform in Nashville, Tenn., who leads a team of four. To do that, he has been watching webinars and peppering his network of tech-savvy colleagues, friends and family with questions. 

“I’m confident that my skill set is not AI, but it will be one day,” he says. “If you don’t have impostor syndrome, you’re not learning.” 

Winterfield, the Tandem CEO, says she has embarked on a similar crash course in AI. In addition to her own research, she spoke with other founders and investors and studied with Tandem engineers how other fintech companies were implementing AI into business operations.

They have since developed an AI application—a recommendation feature that analyzes users’ data to suggest what expenses they might want to share with their partners.

Her growing expertise has raised her confidence, she says. Still, “How do you get up to speed on all of this?” she asks. “It’s so much.”