The CEO Forum Group Magazine Business 2023 (1) - Flipbook - Page 10
Ravi Kumar S
agency to the users versus handing over the agency
to developers. It is an exciting time when technology
is going to be powering human productivity,
amplifying human potential and creating upward
mobility in jobs and prosperity in society at large.
So what should CEOs do to manage this emerging
world of generative AI?
The first advice I would give to CEOs is to build a
learning enterprise and an employee base of lifelong
learners. The speed of change is pretty high and the
half life of skills so short that you have to be able to
learn, unlearn, and relearn and move through these
cycles continually with a clock speed that matches the
pace of change around us.
I also believe we live in a very heterogeneous world
and we’re always going to be judged on how to
build growth in that heterogeneity. Creating an
environment where you can thrive by building growth
imperatives that draw from that heterogeneity is
very important. In a fast moving world, you want to
create a safety net for entrepreneurial spirit, a fail fast
culture, and a culture of experimentation.
need to have human judgment embedded with data
into AI algorithms. So I do believe this is a big shift
in the way enterprise landscapes and workplaces are
going to operate.
I’ll add one last thing into the mix—generative AI
is very different from the machine learning we’ve
seen over the last decade or so. Machine learning
algorithms handed over the agency to the developers,
who in turn, created customized, personalized
software which we all use as consumers. With the
advent of generative AI, that agency is going to be
handed back to end users. End users will humanize
the technology like never before and gen AI will take
away the constraints—like digital skills—because
the software is going to learn and personalize
the algorithms for users’ individual needs. So in
summary, generative AI is going to hand over the
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In a world of heterogeneity, you have to see what is
coming, connect the dots, make everyone believe in
your vision of the future and then rally behind it. It’s
easy to see what is coming; but it’s hard for everyone
to rally behind the cause and believe in it because few
people have access to the CEO’s vantage point. CEOs
can connect the dots much better than any individual
employee. So these are a few things I would advise my
fellow CEOs to look for.
So Ravi, you have a large organization of over
350,000 people. How do you create a learning
enterprise?
Robert, I’ll tell you one or two things which allow
us to be a learning enterprise. At Cognizant we built
an initiative called Bluebolt. Bluebolt is a grassroots
innovation movement and through it we encourage