McKinsey Has a New Idea for AI: Teach It How Your CEO Makes Decisions
Your CEO’s brain might be the next big AI asset.
EXPERT OPINION BY DAN SCHAWBEL, MANAGING PARTNER OF WORKPLACE INTELLIGENCE
What if AI could learn how your CEO thinks? According to McKinsey research, that’s becoming possible. In a new McKinsey Quarterly article, senior partners Kurt Strovink and Sangeeth Ram explain how AI can capture the hard-to-articulate judgment behind a leader’s decisions and make that expertise available across the organization.
They call the approach an executive AI, an ambient layer with context, memory, and a system of record built around knowledge graphs of the leader’s decisions, people, commitments and signals.
The goal isn’t to replace human judgment. It’s to make a leader’s expertise accessible across the organization, even when that leader isn’t in the room.
What gets lost when leaders leave or stay too busy
The researchers point out that when a great CEO leaves, the strategy decks, board minutes and decision memos remain. However, the reasoning behind thousands of decisions does not.
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Successors often spend months reconstructing a standard of judgment that the old leader took for granted. Employees keep trying to calibrate to standards they can sense but never fully define.
They also cite a Harvard Business School study, which found that the average CEO works 62.5 hours a week and spends less than half of that time on strategic priorities.
How executive AI works in practice
McKinsey describes five parts of an executive AI, which are steering the leader’s attention, codifying tacit knowledge, augmenting decisions in real time, sparring with simulated perspectives and closing the learning loop with a structured debrief after important decisions.
Source: www.inc.com
