Leading the People Side of AI in Organizations

by Sarah Thurber and Cole Miller

AI doesn’t create value. 

People using AI effectively do.

Specifically, people who share a unique skillset: They know how to recognize worthwhile problems, push beyond obvious ideas, visualize and prototype solutions, and act on the best ones. 

Those aren’t technical skills. They are thinking skills.

Without strong thinking skills, people tend to… 

• Focus on the wrong problems.

• Scale the wrong solutions.

Organizations can create value with AI when 1) people share a common language for the thinking process that leads to value creation, and 2) leaders foster a healthy dynamic between top-down direction and bottom-up discovery.

This collaborative approach avoid swinging between the disappointing extremes of individual AI experiments that don’t scale and centralized agents that miss the mark. 

This paper describes three positions can connect organizational direction with individual and team learning: Leaders, Managers, and Individuals/Teams.

• Leaders identify strategic goals, set boundaries, resource learning.

• Individuals /Teams discover problems, prototype and validate solutions. 

• Managers translate in both directions without becoming the sole gatekeepers 

AI literacy is necessary, but it is not sufficient. This paper focuses on elevating the durable skills of human problem solving so the best AI solutions are discovered, put forward, improved and scaled. 

That means building skills of metacognition and creative problem solving. It means giving Individuals and Teams structured opportunities to discover problems, prototype solutions, and validate what helps. It means preparing Managers to frame, translate, amplify, and reduce noise. It means asking Leaders to monitor the ecosystem, focus attention, resource learning, and decide broader scope. 

This approach does not replace AI governance, change management, product or service ownership, or technical operations.

Instead, it engages people in how to put AI to work for them.

Excerpted from the FourSight White Paper "Leading the People Side of AI"

To read more, download the full White Paper