It’s tempting these days to take decision-making shortcuts. After all, in a fast-moving business world, leaders should take advantage of anything they can to speed up the decision-making process. Generative AI could provide quicker, and arguably better decisions, right?
Not so fast. Here are three reasons why using AI might be a bad idea.
Why People Should Make Decisions — Not AI
- AI lacks the nuanced perspective necessary to make complicated decisions.
- AI doesn’t consider the impact of its decisions on human beings.
- AI can quickly become a crutch for decision-averse individuals.
AI Lacks the Insight Humans Gain From Lived Experience
An old boss of mine used to say that data is only data, not information. AI can give you tons of data, but data alone, without context, isn’t enough to base informed decisions on.
Also, AI lacks the most critical aspect of decision-making: insight.
Your experience gives you unique insight, which is unique to you. In your experience, you have made bad decisions. You have learned from those. In your experience, you have made good decisions too. Together they form your unique decision-making skills and insight.
You should rely less on information and more on the insight your experience adds to that information. There’s a reason doctors are not relying on AI to make their diagnoses, even though AI ostensibly can. It’s because the best diagnoses come from information plus the doctors’ insight and experience.
AI Does Not Care About People
Most, if not all, business decisions affect people. If you make bad decisions, your people will suffer the consequences. If you make good decisions, they will prosper. Every decision you make must be tempered by the impact on your employees requiring nuance.
AI will not factor people in.
Moreover, if your people think AI is making decisions, not you, that will make them uneasy. Ask yourself this: if your doctor said you needed major surgery, and you later found out AI made that call, would you be happy about it? Would you ever trust that doctor again?
Today, most people wouldn’t trust their health care decisions to AI, and the same applies when it comes to their jobs. If you start having AI make your decisions, your people will lose trust and faith in you. When that happens, you lose the ability to lead them.
People want to know their leaders have compassion and empathy. They want to know their leaders care. AI doesn’t care about outcomes or how people feel.
AI just does not care. Great leaders do. A leader’s caring for employees is what drives great outcomes.
AI Can Be a Decision-Making Cop-Out
Some leaders look for ways to short-cut the hard, sometimes messy job of leadership.
This is why some leaders prefer listicles. They want a three-step formula for any problem. A five-step easy way to improve productivity. Easy steps for any leadership challenge. But in times of difficulty, or during a crisis, leaders have to deal with the most complicated part of leadership: leading through human emotions. Leading through conflict. Leading through the dark times.
It’s perfectly fine to use AI or any other tool at your disposal to facilitate better outcomes. But don’t lean on AI as a be-all and end-all to decision-making. It can be one tool in your arsenal, but do not let it be the only or even primary tool.
Lately, it seems like everyone is on the “AI is the answer to all our problems,” or “AI will be the cause of all future problems” bandwagon.
I gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal recently about AI predicting when a chief executive officer would get Alzheimer’s. The premise was that someone might record a CEO’s speech on an iPhone, then submit it to AI for predictive analysis. If AI predicted the CEO would have Alzheimer’s in six years, all hell would break loose with the shareholders.
Really? Shareholders don’t care what might or might not happen in six years. They care about the next six quarters. If that wasn’t true, the ex-CEO of Starbucks would not have been ousted after only two bad quarters.
Don’t get me wrong. AI has a lot of value, and as it matures as a technology it will have even greater value. Just don’t use it to make your decisions. At least not now.
