Rahim Hirji on AI for Business Leaders: the fourth dimension every AI strategy leaves out

Terry O'DwyerYou've spent three years talking to more than 200 organisations. What is it that you're seeing that most people are missing?

Most companies have got a process in place. They're thinking about AI. When you go to any company and you say, have you got an AI strategy, they say yes, we've got all of the things covered off. They'll say that they've got a process, they're looking at process and automating it and changing it. They're looking at cost reductions and the opportunities from that area. And then they're looking at revenue opportunities and new products and new services.

I've historically come from the edtech industry and I watched this whole layer of edtech rebuild itself around things like AI lesson plans. All of these things are legitimate, but in my research I think that they're missing this whole thing, and it irks me a little bit, because there's this fourth dimension which is human capability. I think it's the game changer. It sits across all of the AI prongs or pillars that you might have.

The way that AI is being perceived by leaders is black or white. You're either on the boat with it or you're off. When you think about the humans or the employees within an organisation, they're putting them into two camps. I see it very differently. I think that people can become more human in this moment and not less, and they can lean into the different set of skills, the super skills that I've got. Curiosity, change readiness, empathy.

But the game-changing question that almost nobody's asking is, what does an organisation need its people to become to succeed in the new world? I don't think that people think about the human bit first. They think about the tech first, and I think that's a mistake, because this is the first time that technology has come for our brains. We've lived through multiple different eras. Every other era came for different things. It came for our hands and tools. It came for processing speed. And this one is coming for the thing that we thought would make us irreplaceable. And we're still thinking about it as a tool problem. Maybe CEOs are evolving somewhat, but the thing I'd say is we need to reframe this AI strategy process as a thinking problem, and then I think the conversation will shift.

Terry O'DwyerWhat do you mean by human capability?

Let me give you an example. Back in the day, when you go and get insurance, I would go to my insurance broker and he worked out of his garage. In his garage it was quite cold. He had a heater, he had this desk, he had this big leather chair. And he had this biscuit tin with one penny coins in them, because insurance back in the day cost nineteen ninety-nine.

He thought his value was in writing out the name and all the details in the form that he would go and post off. There would be this blue ink that he would put into these forms. He thought that his value was this pen and the fact that he was talking to us. But the real thing that I saw in him was trust. I trusted him. I'd go back to him every year. This guy's long gone and passed away. But it's really about the value that humans bring, and people forget about that value.

You have no idea what your value is at this point in time, because everything has been thrown off. So it's about taking a step back and saying, this is where my value lives as a human. And as an organisation you might look at it and say, here's where we should be leaning in, and not just taking these fast steps away.

I spoke to a bank recently, and a number of companies in financial services, and they said that they were very pleased that they had automated part of their research function. Five years ago, before ChatGPT, nobody was saying we need to automate research for cost savings. No one was asking that question. AI showed up and they said, oh, we can do this, because we can get all of the data now from ChatGPT or Claude, and they've re-engineered their function to do that. For me, I said this is a big mistake, because research is where someone's actually using their brain to ask the right questions and to decide what the business does next.

Terry O'DwyerWhat was the cost of doing that?

Let's assume they had a team of ten, which is roughly what they had, and they reduced that down to a team of two. They had missed out half of the questions that they used to ask before, because they lost all of the wisdom from people who'd been in that industry and seen different waves in the past. And secondly, there was no one to look at the oversight to make sure that the AI is covering the right areas, because they didn't have all of the knowhow on what's going on. Subsequently they're bringing some of that team back, because they realise they're missing a trick.

What happens is AI comes in as a strategy, it comes in as procurement, and it gets rolled out through tech, or it gets measured in metrics. It might be licences that are activated, or how many times people use AI. But it never really gets to the CEO's desk. The CEO says, oh, we're doing AI. And then it doesn't sit there with the CEO. It doesn't go back and say, are we asking the right questions? You can't lead with what technology can do. You have to lead with what humans want to operate and the direction that you want to go in.

The thing that AI cannot take, and this is where we go back to human capability, is it cannot take the relationships, it cannot take this trust. Go back to the garage broker. If he was alive today, I know that you can do all of these comparisons online, and that's how we usually do things, but if I have this weird situation around my insurance I'm going to go to him, because it doesn't get dealt with by the insurance engine.

Terry O'DwyerFor a mid-market business where oversight sits with someone already doing three other jobs, how do you guard against a failure like an agent sending a follow-up to a bereaved client?

It's not really necessarily about the bereaved client, but the thing that terrifies me a bit is incomplete data. That's where significant errors are going to happen as we take steps forward. You walk into this world where AI is the default and not the exception, and the human stuff is the context that the AI can't know or feel. It doesn't know the relationship. It doesn't know the conversation that you haven't recorded because it was inappropriate to record it. It doesn't know the gut feeling that you feel because you've spoken to them a number of times in person. There's no dashboard for that type of stuff.

The guard is not more oversight, because you haven't got time for that on a regular basis. It's about asking one question of every workflow. Where in this process does a human need to be present that a dashboard can't explain? Is it at the beginning? Is it at the end? Is it when four or five different things come together? Is it before you send things out? It's going to be different in different industries.

I see oversight as this new area that humans are going to go into, and I think it's currently underrated in this new world. Everyone talks about acceleration, they talk about deployment, they talk about adoption, but no one talks about oversight as a discipline. When you talk to organisations, they say, yeah, we've got oversight in everything we're doing. But oversight is only useful if you have the power to intervene. Intervention is what makes you human in the loop, not just witnessing the information. If you can only monitor the information that is there or what is happening, you're not overseeing it. You're just like a friend to the agent. Real oversight is when you can ring the alarm and you can stop the machine and say, no, don't do this, something's not quite working.

Terry O'DwyerWhere should a mid-market leader start?

You need to reposition for this new world. The thing I say to clients is a thought experiment. Let's assume that AI takes eighty per cent of what you're doing off your plate tomorrow. Don't worry about your job. Let's assume all of those things are okay. Eighty per cent of the tasks are done by agents. Now, what would you do with your time? Most leaders in mid-market companies are saying, well, I do more of what's left, because that's what I know what to do. I think that's completely the wrong answer.

We're moving from this old world of knowledge management, knowledge thinking. That's old school thinking. It was a world where productivity was highly regarded. If you have more Outlooks which were dinging and more Slacks which were pinging, you'll be doing lots of work. I just call that busy work, and I think we've been mistaking that for productivity for quite a long time.

I'd say you look at what you're doing right now and you start to protect your thinking. Once a week you'd sit down as an individual and then come together as an organisation and say, this is what I'm going to be doing for the following week, and use that time for thinking time. I remember being in organisations where people would block this time off and I thought, no, that's a bit arrogant, they've got time to think, and I had a very busy diary. In fact they were the ones who were right. I was the one who was wrong. The thinking time is what's actually going to become really important.

We should stop saying human in the loop and really say human first. So you might sit down with a problem. When I've got a problem, instead of going brain to fingers to keyboard, which is what most people do, or starting with prompting, I start writing first and start scribbling. My writing is not very good, but I start scribbling to try and figure out those problems.

Terry O'DwyerSo protect that authorship time in your diary.

Absolutely. For the last twenty-five or thirty years we've been living in a world where execution was really important. I used to say I'm a strategy guy, I can come up with great ideas. I'd go to interviews and they'd say, well, can you actually execute, can you do the stuff, can you prove that you've done it, where's the data? That was the knowledge economy that we were in. If you could research it, if you could build it, if you could format it, if you could coordinate it, optimise it, if you could make it programmatic, you'd be in a great position, and that was a great position to be in for the last thirty years.

Now we're in this world where agents do all of that. What they can't do is decide what's worth executing. They can't set the direction. They can't weigh up competing values or author intent.

I've been involved in organisations where we used to have Thursday afternoon all-hands meetings. Every week you'd have this manager who would be pulling the numbers, reformatting charts, chasing three people on Slack to update bits and pieces. That's changing now, because the agent can do that. When you get to authorship, you have that data, and the conversation changes. Rather than collecting the data and doing the busy work, the important stuff becomes the authorship: what are we going to do with that data, what are the questions that we are going to take forward.

Terry O'DwyerWhat are the seven capabilities?

The seven super skills are curiosity, change readiness, big picture thinking, principled innovation, empathy, global adaptability, and the augmented mindset. They all work in a specific order. The two I think are really important for mid-market companies are curiosity and the augmented mindset. Curiosity is the first one on the list and the augmented mindset is the last one, and they all come together in this arc.

The reason I mention curiosity is that people come back to me and say, everyone says that they're curious. No one says I'm not curious. So that's an obvious one. And I say, well, it's not an obvious one, because we all think we're curious. I think curiosity is the skill that's most under threat right now because of AI.

Terry O'DwyerHow does one be deliberately curious?

Go back to that piece of paper, asking the questions yourself before going into the AI, because what we're doing is we're tricking ourselves into thinking that we've come up with the answers, and you're losing the muscle of being curious and asking the questions of every single thing that we are doing. It's more important to be asking the questions before you get to the AI than it is to say, here are these great questions and I'm going to take this to my manager. There's this thing around following through on your questioning before you get to AI, and having a hypothesis before you get to AI.

Terry O'DwyerSo you ask yourself a question about the question.

Absolutely. It is quite a meta situation, but it's taking that step back and noting those things down. Why was I thinking about that in the first place? Was I thinking about that because I was influenced by an algorithm, or something else that I read, or is that something that actually I think and it's forming in my head and I need to form it myself before I have my own hypothesis?

Terry O'DwyerWhat do you mean by augmented mindset?

In the interest of time I'd say it's human plus AI. Human plus AI is more powerful than humans alone or more powerful than AI alone. The example that I bring is Tony Stark and Iron Man. Tony Stark isn't great because of the suit. He's great because he decides when to wear it and when not to wear it. The suit gives him these extra capabilities, these superpowers, and he brings intent. He brings the judgement that we're talking about, and he essentially brings the whole game. Crucially, he makes the decision when to wear it and when not to wear it. That's really what the new world is going to be like. When do you think and use your brain and use your capability and use your judgement, and when do you say, I'm going to press go.

Terry O'DwyerIf you were sitting in front of a leadership team at a mid-market business, what is your advice?

It's not about status updates anymore, because the status updates happen and they should be happening. The question is what questions do you need to ask. There was a company that I was working with, and instead of having a status update meeting they would vote on the questions that were most important to the business going forward. The reason they were doing that was because they didn't know what the world was going to turn into. The north star that companies had, which was five or ten years out, has changed, because the world is moving so quickly that that north star is going to come in two years' time, and therefore you need to start pivoting quicker.

I would say sit down and say, look, this world is moving really quickly in our industry, and looking at our competitors who are going to have access to the same kind of technology, what is it that we need to look at from our individuals in our organisation that's going to differentiate us?

The other thing is, back in the late eighties and early nineties you'd have these X teams, the people who are most au fait with the technology or the strategy of the business and can get stuff done. Get those people together to really energise the organisation, because this is about changing whole organisations. Especially mid-market ones, who are right at that point where they could grow in a massive way but they could also die off in a massive way, quite quickly. Get the people who are going to spark this change, sit there with them and say, this is your new remit for the next year or two years, and make that change happen. It's not just one person. It's multiple people with different mindsets coming together who have a shared feel for what's going on in the market and in the industry, but also have got this human capability that they're not bound by the tech that's within the organisation.

Terry O'DwyerRahim, this has been a super fascinating conversation, and I look forward to seeing your next endeavour.