AI is a powerful business tool. But it cannot replace personal storytelling
Is AI being simultaneously underplayed and overplayed? Almost every day another article emerges either calling time on human endeavor (machines will soon do everything), or declaring the technology an expensive luxury (unreliable, untrustworthy and hard to monetize).
Neither forecast is likely to come true. The truth is that AI is already a powerful business tool that – when applied and executed properly – can free leaders to do what they do best: being human. The risk is not that machines eclipse humans, but that leaders delegate their responsibilities to robots. We are in charge – and must remain so.
I was touched by the words of Nolitha Fakude, president of the International Women’s Forum of South Africa (IWFSA), at Duke Corporate Education’s Humanizing Leadership in the AI World conference in Johannesburg. “If we do not champion the human agency of leading with the head, the heart and the hands,” she told delegates, “then we will not have any humanity to talk about.”
The brilliance of Fakude’s words is that they are evergreen. They were as true before the advent of AI as they are now: humans’ role is to be humane. Leaders who shirk that responsibility ought not to be leaders. That was the case in the industrial revolution, and it is the case now in the digital revolution. The acid test of whether a task should be executed by a person or a machine can be a question of emotion. How would interacting with a machine make you or a colleague feel, versus a meeting between humans? Even placing a screen between people can reduce our emotional connection.
As a mentor on the IWFSA Fasset Women’s Legacy Programme, which promotes and empowers women in the financial sector in partnership with the Financial and Accounting Sector Education and Training Authority (Fasset) and Duke CE, Nana Magomola insists on face-to-face meetings with mentee candidates. “I don’t do video,” Magomola told the conference. “I deliberately do a one-on-one. Yes, we must embrace technology because it makes our lives easier. But we must take the time, too, to mentor people in a personal way.”
Now imagine if the mentor was not a person at all, but an AI. The personal connection we seek and need as people becomes more distant still. There is little evidence that robots will win our hearts. What evidence we do have is to the contrary.
The reason might lie in stories. Humans love stories – and have an innate knack for storytelling – because we have something that AIs lack: our own backstories. Kopano Cowen, a TV and film development specialist, values AI as a powerful tool in televisual production. Yet, at the conference, she recalled seeing a poster declaring that ‘AI does not have a traumatic past’ at a Screen Actors Guild protest in Hollywood. “Creatives create from life experience,” Cowen told delegates. “Anything we create that resonates comes from there. That’s why I don’t feel threatened by AI at all.”
Leaders would be wise to take note. To get the best out of people, we must be able to relate to them. People learn from the lives of others. Leaders can share their experiences with their people, tell the stories of their challenges, and how they overcame them.
Industrial history is itself a story worth telling. As humans discovered new technologies, they freed their hands to use their heads. Artificial intelligence will free our heads to use our hearts. And that is to be celebrated. Because great leadership is always a human – and heartfelt – endeavor.
Dr Sharmla Chetty is chief executive of Duke Corporate Education