Ignoring AI Could Spell Disaster For Top Executives

How long will your company survive if all of your competitors instantly become 30% more productive? What if your competitors are suddenly 50% more productive? That might sound like hyperbole or fear-mongering, but new research shows it’s anything but.

In one recent MIT study, managers, marketers, HR professionals, consultants, and data analysts who used AI wrote their memos/reports 37% faster with better quality. And not only were people more productive, their job satisfaction increased. A study of software developers found that those using AI implemented a JavaScript task 55.8% faster than the developers without AI.

Customer support agents using AI increased the number of customer issues resolved per hour by 13.8%. With AI, they participated in multiple chats at once, spent about 9% less time per chat, handled 14% more chats per hour, and successfully resolved more chats overall. When an agent with just two months’ tenure at the firm used AI, they performed as well as an agent with six months’ experience working without AI. And attrition rates among agents with AI were nearly 9% lower than agents without AI.

To put it bluntly, every single one of your company’s competitors has access to free or inexpensive AI tools that could erase your competitive advantages in a matter of months or even weeks. Your new competitive advantage will be how quickly you can get every employee in your organization trained on AI.

The problem is that Leadership IQ’s new study on AI readiness discovered that 73% of leaders admit to having minimal or no experience with AI tools. And 55% of leaders believe that their employees are indifferent, reluctant, resistant or in denial about AI.

The key for every company is to immediately get employees to use AI. Even if you start with small tasks, people need to experience the power of AI firsthand if they have any hope of embracing its potential.

For example, imagine you have to write an executive memo analyzing your division’s balance sheet and income statement. Even for experienced leaders, analyzing the numbers, calculating key financial ratios, and writing the memo could take multiple hours. But with AI, the analysis and memo can literally be completed within five minutes. (You can watch a video tutorial showing how to do it in ChatGPT).

In a case like this, not only is AI blazingly fast compared to a human, but AI takes away much of the drudgery of this work.

Perhaps your executive team just had a meeting, and to keep everyone accountable, you want to summarize the meeting and identify everyone’s to-dos. Rather than spending the next hour reviewing and synthesizing your notes, AI can take the transcript of the call and, within seconds, give you a summary and a person-by-person breakdown of who’s responsible for what. AI can even write follow-up emails for you. (Here’s a video tutorial showing the process step-by-step).

Rather than letting your new salespeople spend months learning through trial and error, AI can take conversations from your best salespeople and rewrite the scripts for your new hires. AI can analyze your best marketing campaigns and identify precisely why they outperformed your worst ones.

There are thousands of potential activities that can be sped up and improved with AI. But again, the key is to get your employees using these tools now. If your employees don’t start using AI today, your competitors will, and they’ll get faster, better, and smarter. If you ignore AI, you’re giving away money, a competitive edge, and future success every single day. Every task they complete 37% faster or customer issue they resolve 14% more efficiently is a win for them and a loss for you.

IBM’s CEO recently announced that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automation in five years. They’re not waiting around to get started with AI. If you don’t want to lose the competitive advantages you’ve built up over the years, you need to get your workforce using AI today.