Will Artificial Intelligence replace the thinking executive?
With Digital Transformation going at a pace, Prof. Niall McKeown discusses the role of the business leader when it comes to building a business that can create a new, sustainable competitive advantage, leveraging artificial intelligence.
Okay, if you don’t mind, I’ll switch to English. My Finnish is a little rusty, so I was never a strong Finnish speaker. My name is Niall and I come from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. We voted to remain in the EU. The mess that is ensuing is not our fault and is particularly not the fault of my small region of where I come from in the UK.
I’m here to ask the question (and hopefully answer it) is: “Will AI make you irrelevant?”
I started my business 20 years ago. June, actually, in 1999. Of course, I was seven years old. You can tell to look at me! And when we started, we created one of the first high-capacity email broadcast engines. We wrote every line of code we put it on servers and we put it into the hardware infrastructure inside major banks and corporations around the world.
Business grew rapidly and we thought everything was good. We were safe, secure. That was until 2007. Someone came up with an alternative version. It was pure quality. It wasn’t as fast. It sat in the cloud, whatever this was. I remember in 1999 this is five, six years before the invention of YouTube, several years before social media. And we progressed thinking that life would continue on that trajectory forever.
But the introduction of cloud, and the movement of email marketing to marketers and away from technologists, caused a disruption in our marketplace. We shrank dramatically down to a mere 7 staff, having grown year after year. We thought our clients (which included Wall Street banks, the European Bank, Reuters media agency) they would never leave us.
Within 16 months they all did. When disruption happens, it happens fast and I wasn’t prepared for it. That’s what took me into academia to try to understand how this phenomenon could happen. And it’s not a new phenomenon. Disruption is not new: ask the candlestick maker, ask the person who shoes the horses, the blacksmith.
This is my hometown in the 1930s. All of these ladies are at a conference about electricity, an electricity conference. It seems a little crazy. Electricity: it’s ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. Back in the 30s, electricity typically had an electricity strategy within a business. There was someone in charge of electricity. My argument is that there’s no difference between the electricity of the 1930s and the digital technologies of today.
We’re at a conference to find out what it’s going to be like, some predictions, but the answer is the same as electricity: it is ubiquitous, it is a low cost, it is everywhere. Having access to it does not make a differentiated business. Having access to it is not going to create a competitive advantage, that’s why we stopped creating strategies around electricity.
But yet strangely, we create strategies around digital, as if there’s a digital strategy as if that’s going to make the differentiation. It’s not. It’s people that will make the differentiation. It’s what we decide to do with these tools that’s going to make the differentiation. And like electricity disrupted industries, the new technology of AI is going to radically disrupt and change industries.
The story of AI is a long-winded fairy tale that goes right back to the 1950s. This isn’t new, electricity was in Ireland in 1880. It didn’t really come into play until the 1930s. AI has been around since the 1950s when this gentleman, John McCarthy, (of Irish descent I may say, definitely Ireland is going to claim it invented AI, just give us a moment and we’ll do that!) McCarthy coined the phrase “artificial intelligence”. It was the idea of being able to simulate human cognitive behaviours through computing means.
