With AI already having a significant impact on careers, we recently asked Jane Austin, SVP at Contentsquare, about how the tools are impacting leadership judgement.
Transcript
Has AI improved leadership judgment or is it amplifying noise? Bit of both I would say, but it's mostly amplifying noise because often judgment was employed in the act of making a roadmap or doing a design and you'd try things and you'd fail and that's kind of where the craft came in. But now you can make anything, and anything generally is rubbish. There's just so much bad quality artefacts out there, and the artefacts are an expression of bad thinking. So I think mostly what's true is that AI has made bad strategy and bad thinking very, very visible.
But I also think if you harness it correctly, it makes strategy and execution very, very much better because you can use it as a sparring partner. You can use it to do research. You can use it to interrogate your thinking. But thinking is what the difference is. If you outsource your thinking, then you have really bad results. If you have the thinking, if you have the taste, the craft, you think deeply about what you're trying to do, you think about how you're going to differentiate, and then you have the output, that's where you have much better quality.
So I think in the age of AI, the differentiator is taste and craft and thinking, and thinking about the strategy. Execution is just a minor by-product of that quality upstream thinking. And if you haven't got that, then the execution makes your lack of judgment, taste and strategy very, very visible.
