The AI-savvy leader 9 ways to take back control and make AI work

De Cremer, professor and director of the Centre on AI Technology for Humankind at the National University of Singapore, suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) should augment rather than replace management and employees. Replacement will mostly lead to failure for the intended business purposes. AI can analyze large amounts of data to find patterns difficult for employees to discover. However, AI has difficulty covering strategic planning and the nuances of human preferences, empathy, and relationships between employees, leaders, customers, and other stakeholders. For example, AI can list many different combinations of pizza ingredients, such as Marmite and shrimp, but that is an unappealing combination for most customers. De Cremer organizes the book around nine classic management topics: learning, purpose, inclusion, communication, vision, balance, empathy, mission, and emotional intelligence. Some examples of company AI experiences come from Tesla, Crush Pizza, the Colorado State Fair, and Microsoft. Management should learn what AI, such as ChatGPT, can do and develop an augmentation plan aligned with its strategic plan. The book does not use scientific language but is based on company experiences and research in leading scientific journals. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty; professionals. --Gundars E Kaupins, Boise State University

In this substantial business manual, De Cremer (Leadership by Algorithm), the dean of Northeastern University's business school, urges executives and managers to augment, rather than replace, human workers with AI. Outlining nine principles for integrating the technology into one's workflow, De Cremer argues, for instance, that AI should primarily be used to automate simple tasks so employees can spend more time on creative aspects of their job. He encourages managers to "develop a human-centered approach" and warns that an unnamed company's decision to use AI to monitor workers' progress on various projects resulted in more mistakes and higher turnover, which the author attributes to employees feeling "as if they were being treated like robots." The suggestions manage the difficult task of giving meaningful guidance while staying broad enough to apply across a variety of contexts, such as when De Cremer entreats readers to rank "repetitive and manual" tasks by effort or cost and then research "AI-based solutions to those problems." De Cremer's insistence that AI is no substitute for human workers gives the lie to unrealistic techno-utopian promises, and he demonstrates a refreshing willingness to topple corporate shibboleths, as when he warns that "efficiency isn't everything" because the moments of human inspiration that AI can't yet replicate rarely happen on a predictable timeline. This will make executives think twice before replacing their employees with software. (June)