Over the last couple of years two acronyms have risen to the top of C-Suite agendas: AI and ML. Capable of touching almost every aspect of any business, artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming the working world. To understand the impact, three tech pioneers give us their take on this sea-change for the C-Suite.
AWAKENING THE C-SUITE
TO A BRAVE NEW WORLD
We use AI and ML all the time: it’s in our phones, our cars, our homes, and increasingly in our workplaces. Although it has actually long been a background feature of our working lives, the seemingly exponential advances in AI and ML have brought it rapidly to the forefront of boardroom brainstorming across the globe.
DAN Pell
This has become the number one topic. Every CEO, CFO, CHRO, COO, they’re all thinking about what the impact of AI and ML is going to have on their business.
UKI Country Manager Workday
The urgent appreciation of how AI and ML can amplify human potential and drive competitive advantage is inspiring its adoption from the top-down: 98% of global CEOs believe they would benefit from AI, although 49% say that their organisation is still unprepared for it. But change is happening now. The C-Suite knows that it needs to gear up and adopt AI and ML, embracing the benefits it brings to their workstreams. This is having an immediate effect on three C-Suites in particular: the CIO, CHRO, and CFO.
THE CIO:
THE TRANSFORMATION ENGINEER
Inevitably, much responsibility for AI and ML falls on the CIO. As well as keeping the servers running, CIOs are expected to optimise productivity; for this, many recognise AI and ML as a powerful toolset that frees up talent. While some worry that they are not ready, or may be blamed if things go wrong, CIOs are keen to explore the opportunities – and that can start with automating their own services.
Sayan Chakraborty
Most of the questions people ask of your IT help desk are the same questions over and over again. Machines are really good at answering these questions.
Co-President at Workday
Similarly, AI and ML excels at tirelessly detecting and analysing the ever-increasing number of potential cyber threats: 34% of IT leads see its immediate value as risk identification. Beyond their own departments, the CIO is tasked with delivering a powerful, streamlined, agile IT infrastructure that supports their entire organisation.
56%
say operational efficiency is the main driver of increased AI and ML adoption and investment
CLARE HICKIE
Over half of EMEA’s IT leaders say that AI and ML will make it easier for IT to support other business teams. They also believe that AI and ML will enable IT teams to deliver more strategic value.
CTO, EMEA at Workday
Two major beneficiaries of this should be the CHRO and CFO: AI and ML can immediately change how they operate, amplifying their productivity and guiding smarter decisions.
THE CHRO:
THE SKILLS SEEKER
With 33% of HR leaders dissatisfied with the tools their teams use, AI and ML can significantly improve some essential everyday tasks.
DAN Pell
There are some really nice generative AI use cases now around job descriptions, around performance reviews, around creating knowledge articles. What might have taken two or three hours to finesse, can take 30 seconds.
UKI Country Manager Workday
AI & ML
is expanding the talent search across all sectors to include anyone, anywhere with a relevant skill set
It’s also opening new ways to simplify HR interactions, with conversational AI enabling employees to literally talk to their HR platforms for actions such as booking time off or co-ordinating business trips.
More fundamentally, AI and ML is enabling HR’s transition to a skills-based economy. Instead of looking for talent in the traditional ‘resume’ pool of education, qualification, and experience, AI and ML is expanding the talent search across all sectors to include anyone, anywhere with a relevant skill set.
Sayan Chakraborty
As a CHRO, you need to open the aperture on where you get talent from. The only way to do that at scale is leveraging artificial intelligence, leveraging machine learning.
Co-President at Workday
THE CFO:
THE FINANCIAL NAVIGATOR
AI and ML’s capacity to perform massive and mundane tasks at speed and with accuracy is also transforming the world of the CFO. Finance has often been seen as a rear looking activity with a lot of manual processes and analysing of data.
Sayan Chakraborty
People are not really good at looking at hundreds of thousands of transactions to find the one that shouldn’t be in there. Computers are.
Co-President at Workday
So, with AI and ML crunching the numbers, CFOs are free to lift their heads from the books and more actively support their organisation’s development with future-looking insights.
Indeed, along with improved forecasting and budgeting, one in three finance leaders see the most immediate value of AI and ML as supporting scenario and strategic planning across multiple business lines. With the ability for AI to quickly model business outcomes, while importantly keeping a human as the final decision maker, 40% of finance leads see AI and ML enabling them to deliver more strategic value.
With
AI & ML
crunching the numbers, CFOs are free to lift their heads from the books
CLARE HICKIE
By reducing what used to take months or weeks down to hours or minutes, they can help the organisation manoeuvre where it needs to and focus on those areas that need focusing to drive the growth.
CTO, EMEA at Workday
THE FUTURE
C-SUITE
With 61% of businesses having already embarked on their AI and ML voyage, the C-Suite itself is starting to change. We’re at the point where we could see a specialist AI and ML advisor join the C-Suite - perhaps even a Chief AI Officer. AI and ML is also changing boardroom interactions, with the CEO able to open up their dashboards, hit refresh, and see the business in real time, applying modelling to get new insights into their people, finances, and strategic direction. This is AI and ML empowering the C-Suite to plan better for their business, seeing around corners and making data-driven decisions. It’s the future of the C-Suite.
Sayan Chakraborty
It can make your CFO’s job easier; it can make your CHRO’s talent strategy completely different; it absolutely changes how your security team thinks about the world. All the leaders across the organisation should be sitting down to think through, ‘How can I take advantage of this technology?
Co-President at Workday
