Embrace AI to become a W.I.T.C.H. Leader

Let’s start with the beginning. If you – as a leader – are not super fascinated with the AI possibilities ahead of us, you are probably in denial. I am not being innocent or not considering all the risks and implications to civilization. I know them. We can like it or not, we can feel good about it or not, and we can even wish it was not happening, but one thing we just can’t deny: we are in one of the most significant revolutions of the modern era. It can go all wrong, but it can also go right. One can’t just not be fascinated to be living in this moment.

It sparks fear, but my fascination is much stronger than any fear I might feel.

But today, I want to explore a few of the most uncomplicated and weeks-ahead opportunities AI can bring for leaders like you and me. It’s not a futuristic conversation – weeks or months will put it all there – and it’s not philosophical. I will be pragmatic and practical, based on external tools we will all use in a very short time. The impacts of AI in leadership will be more profound than just a few tools to support us. But let’s start with the start.

Let’s stop for a minute to think about what we do in our daily journeys as leaders.

Let’s ask ChatGPT about what we do in our day-to-day routines as leaders “A study conducted by Harvard Business Review (LINK) found that leaders spend an average of 72% of their time in meetings, with 54% of that time spent on recurring meetings. Another study by McKinsey & Company (LINK) found that leaders spend an average of 20% of their time communicating, 25% on people management, 25% on strategy, and 30% on other activities such as problem-solving and decision-making”.

Before taking any conclusions, I decided to check the links and what you expected: they don’t say precisely what ChatGPT concluded. I questioned it, and it said sorry and gave me more data, which I could not confirm. So I questioned it again, and it said there was no conclusive evidence about what I was asking. Then I double-checked it on the good  ole Google, and BAM, thank you GPT! * If you think I am nuts, I will return to this point at the end.

Anyway, once ChatGPT and Google cannot provide conclusive evidence of the time we leaders spend on specific types of activities, I will use my personal experience, which I doubt to be substantially different from yours. And, for my point here, I think it does not matter so much.

I spend 80% of my time in meetings (oh my, oh my). But some of these meetings refer to some of the other activities I spend time on too.

Let’s assume that  40% of my time is for pure meetings (communications). The remaining 60% (a big part of it is also done in meetings) is split into creative/strategic thinking (20%), people connections (20%), pure decision-making (15%), and serendipity (5%).

With that resolved – ok, it’s a guess – I will invite you to an imaginary moment for each part of my time as a leader. As I said, no futuristic journey; all things will happen in 2023, and 2024. Come with me.

Meetings/Communications

In a hybrid world, meetings are supported mainly by Google Meet, MS Teams, or Zoom. The tool hears our meetings, and there are a lot of data there. Let’s imagine that in the next couple of weeks, when MS releases a new update, AI will be able to read the presentation being used, and if the presenter granted it access to all company files on the drive, AI will access this too. And note, this will happen with the necessary security, privacy, and compliance issues checked.

When this happens (in weeks, not months), we will have the most informed, non-emotional, and super pragmatic entity in all meetings. Let’s call our AI tool W, for why. W will not be accessing the web (unless when we ask). It will access our conversations, presentations, history, and data through our drive. Its inputs will not be guesses, will not be from the web, and will be all compliant.

“W, is this meeting running well? Have we come to good conclusions? Which ones? What would be your suggestions?”; “W, are we diverging or converging? Can you give more ideas? Can you now help us converge faster?”, “W, what are the key decisions we’ve made and the ones we still need to make?”; “W, sounds like we are stuck here. Can you access our data and check if we’ve data that can help us move forward?”; “W, can you securely search the web and bring us data to support our decision?”; “W, can everyone talk in this meeting?”; “W, now that we have come to a good decision, can you finalize the slides with our decisions, organize them on our Mural, and also put the tasks on the Trello board, please?” “Thank you, W! It was amazing!”

These are just basic ideas. W will be able to do much more, including identifying and weighing in on some very delicate issues like identifying mansplaining, bossy attitudes, people that just don’t listen, and, obviously, all the toxic things that happen in the workspace.

I am genuinely fascinated by having W in my meetings. It will enhance leadership in all senses.

Creative/Strategic Thinking

This topic is probably the most transformational one. Let’s imagine again some weeks-long ideas, not a distant future.

We all use ( If you don’t use them yet, think about using) tools like Mural and Miro to ideate, support creative sessions, decision-making, and strategic thinking (ok, we use them for much more than this, I know!). So let’s imagine that Mural (Miro, if you come first, I will switch to you!) releases a new version with AI. This version can co-create post-its, reads all the post-its and decks that support our creative session, and accesses our drive (again, all compliance). It can also access all of our data, the previous Mural exercises, decks, docs, etc. And naturally, once we do this remotely, we will also grant access to the Y API on Teams, so all we talk about in the session will be added to the AI data.

This time, let’s call this I – for Ideas.

“I, can you create some post-its for the high-income client journey? Now, the shop seller’s journey?; “I, can you summarize our posts and describe their overall sentiment, and let us know if there are things we are missing?”; “I, can you help us with this session? It looks like we are talking too much and not making any decisions. What would you suggest?”, “I, can you go to our data and check if we have a similar exercise we’ve done successfully before? Can you also cross with external info you can access – securely?”; “I, we have finished. Can you help us decide what we should do next and help us prepare our next session, update the decks, create a doc with the info so we don’t lose it, update our Slack and prepare a presentation and produce a video we can send to the team?”; “I, this was fantastic, thank you for your ideas, facilitation, and provocations!”

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How could one not be fascinated with this?

The power of creativity and innovation will be exponential, and productivity will increase dramatically.

People Connections

This is a tricky topic. A portion of what we do – a super important piece, I would add – is connecting with people and, lots of it, remotely nowadays. This one is the less activity-oriented thing and also the most human-centered.

Let’s use Meet this time – so Google does not believe I don’t think they can catch up with MS – for our imaginary innovation (weeks-long) exercise.

We connect with people, 1:1, thru Meet. Let’s imagine Google releases a personal communications tool with the mission of helping us improve our communications capability. Let’s call this one T – for talk. T will be a plugin (maybe it already exists out there. If your startup does that, please let me know, I want it now!) that helps us improve our communications.

It will not show anything on the 1:1 meeting but generate a panel that only you can see with relevant information to help the connection. Who is talking, clarity of ideas, level of comprehension, the flow of the conversation, the sentiments of your talk and from the person with you, and many others. On the dashboard, you can use the help of T.

“T, am I being clear”; “T, is what I am talking about creating any resistance or reactions? Which ones?”; “T, I think I am unclear. Can you summarize what I am saying? Can you suggest other ways of saying it?”; “T, I am not sure I understand what the person is saying. Can you help summarize it?”; “T, this conversation is not going well. Do you have suggestions”; “T, am I talking too much? Am I being aggressive?”. “T, you helped me to make my points clear with the correct sentiment, thank you!”.

So many problems happen because of communication issues. Can you figure out how a tool like this can help? I can! Imagine you can summarize all your meetings (to yourself) and see if you are clear if people understand what you say, understand the mood you install, check if you listen too little and talk too much, and even see your style and suggestions for improvement.

I want this! Fascinating!

Decision Making 

This is a super key topic. The more informed and less moved by emotions and impulses – don’t confuse this with intuition, guts, and experience, which are essential to any leader – the better the decisions will be.

The challenge is that information is completely spread out in organizations.

From the financial information on ERPs and spreadsheets to all conversations you have in meetings and the zillions of decks, presentations, pitches, proposals, feed-backs, evaluations, and so on. It’s an amazing ocean of all types of living entities!

Leaders are the ones that can figure it all out, not having too much granular information that creates distraction, but also not missing what is happening on the battlefields by just accessing high-level corporate info that is distant and cold. Mixing this with all conversations, events, outside input, thinking, intuition, gut checks, beliefs, and risk-taking.

Wow, not a simple task, especially in such complex times.

Our exercise here might be more futuristic, months instead of weeks. Companies like MS and Google have all the tools to create something like this, but it is more complex.

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My imaginary exercise would be a new tool. Let’s call it C, for conclusion. C will access all data in our organization, including all data from Y and I APIs. All decks, docs, spreadsheets, ERP, HCM, and all systems. Again, all compliance. With our company’s data available, C will help you make decisions more informed, more assertive, and faster. It’s a more complex tool, but doable.

If ChatGPT can access the world’s information and respond to us with amazing things (and it’s just the beginning), imagine if the data are more contained and more organized, and if the leader knows how to use it for a better decision-making process.

“C, my intuition says it’s time to renew our offer, our value proposition. I am basing this on a few trends in our sales cycles, what I am reading in the market, and, honestly, on my gut. Can you help me see the data, trends, and facts that confirm my intuition?”; “C, we have so many things we measure, I want you to help me prioritize the most important ones due to the current macroeconomic moment. What key metrics should we look at and can we highlight any abnormalities happening in any of those metrics?”; “C, I am worried about our utilization rate. Please bring me some data and a summary, and tell me if I should be worried about it. “; “C, can you help me understand the talk of the town on our battlefield? I will do an all-hands and want to address people’s concerns”; “C, thank you so much for helping me observe things that were not on my radar!”.

Oh my, oh my. What a tremendous tool. Can you imagine having something like this to help you make better decisions?

I can. How cool will it be to have C helping us?

Serendipity

Here, we are at the final topic of our day-to-day activities as leaders, and maybe the most challenging one on how AI will help us.

Let’s use a bit of ChatGPT to provoke us. “Overall, AI can help leaders create a more dynamic and innovative environment, increasing the likelihood of serendipitous moments. By leveraging the power of AI, leaders can drive innovation and creativity, leading to better outcomes for their organizations.”

Thank you, GPT, I think you helped me again to have a valid provocation. Our imaginary exercise this time will be to use AI to randomize our lives a bit, something that offices used to do so well and hybrid environments kill. Even the people who moved back to the office (there is a lot to discuss, but let’s focus here…) are much more intentional after several years of remote work. There is always someone remote.People are working with more intention than ever before while spontaneity and serendipity in the workplace is at an all time low.

Let’s imagine a simple tool that randomizes our lives at work. Let’s call it H, for happenchance – R, for random looks over technical and scary! BTW, at CI&T we developed a tool called Coffee Buddy, which connects us randomly with someone else in the company and sets a meeting for both of us, and thus far this has been an amazing experience for employees. So, H would enhance our serendipity, not only connecting people to talk but also suggesting topics, sending material to people that might spark a conversation or a project, identifying common interests, etc, etc. Again, all compliance.

“H, I am thinking about a new GTM for our offer. Who should I talk to that I haven’t? “; “H, I am preparing an article on how leaders benefit from AI. Are there people in our company interested in this topic?”; “H, I am bored, I had an intense day. Plug me in with someone who can bring good energy to my day?”; “H, I am considering bringing my VW Bus from Brazil to the US. Should I bump into anyone with interesting ideas about this?”; “H, I have a lot of energy today. Things are good, is there anyone that would love to have that energy today?”. “Thank you, H, what an amazing chat I had today about my article!”.

This one might look less efficient right? Well, we all know that things in organizations don’t only happen through formal channels, meetings, rituals, but often  through random connections, human connections, and creating a  safe space to be innovative and creative. H will play a significant role here, especially in a world that became so intentional after two years of the pandemic.

If  “Software is eating the world” (Marc Andreessen here), “and AI is changing the menu” (Cesar Gon here) – I would complement it – AI-powered Leaders will be the ones that will build the new menu. Management and leadership will be profoundly – and it is on us to make it also be positively – affected by the AI era. It’s important to say I believe that AI-powered leaders will be more human, more considerate, and more empathetic, not the opposite. Unless we do it all wrong. The new AI-powered leaders will be more orchestrators than inspiring leaders, and AI will be one of the components they will use to orchestrate, but this a huge topic for another entire article.

Just by using these hypothetical and trivial ideas on how AI will enhance leadership – Why, Ideas, Talks, Conclusion, and Happenchance – we will all just become W.I.T.C.H Leaders, smarter, faster, and more efficient. Imagine when the leadership role gets re-invented as a whole by AI! Oh my.

It’s impossible not to see a revolution happening and feel excited about it. I am. And it’s just the beginning. Does it spark fear? It does. I just think: go with fear!

It’s so interesting to be living through all of this. I am fascinated. Aren’t you?

ChatGPT note – if you came here still wondering why I said “GPT is right” at the beginning of this text, it was only to provoke you that AI will not replace us unless we don’t embrace it in our leadership, but it will mainly enhance us. It’s about something other than the right answer, the perfect decision, or excellent communication. It’s about making all those things better, faster, more accurate, and more efficient for us. And, if we all build this right, it will be more creative and pleasurable too.