Leaders need AI but does AI need Leaders?

An empty factory replaced by automation, produced by Midjourney

A lot of the discussion about AI focuses on how it affects us as individuals in the present. We tend to use a personal and immediate perspective, and often apply a simple criterion: if AI is not impacting me now, then it is nothing to worry about.

We also tend to have a uniform view of war as always being the same and universal, a bloody, violent mess resolved by brave people fighting in the mud. We think that technology can only make war faster, more brutal, and more violent.

Historians argue that warfare was shaped by how we learned to communicate 100,000 years ago and that writing 6,000 years ago made it worse. We have heard military leaders claim that the same values that helped them advance in their careers are the ones we will need in the future.

We seem determined to convince ourselves that warfare will not change.

Yet society is changing, rapidly, and there are three factors that leaders should consider when thinking about whether AI needs leaders:

We need AI to compete and win

We cannot process the amount of data, generate valuable insights, or operate at the speed we need to succeed without AI support for our military services. This is a fact based on similar experiences in other sectors. However, current approaches are planning to add a bit of AI here and there without much careful thought or thorough evaluation. I have written elsewhere about the piecemeal approach to AI. I would also add that industry does not always help by tempting users to look at amazing new tools to buy.

We need AI to win and apply that AI across large military operations areas.

AI is transforming every sector and industry with more horizontal and streamlined organisational structures. AI enables more distributed and collaborative decision-making, faster and easier sharing, and higher potential of individuals and teams. Teams can work more efficiently and quickly with the help of AI and do not require the same amount of managerial oversight and feedback.

Just as robots replaced workers, supervisors, inspectors, managers, and other middle-level roles in manufacturing lines, AI will do the same for organisations that rely on information, data, and insights.

The middle managers are the most vulnerable to AI disruption.

Moreover, future leaders will have very different career paths from our current leaders.

Military leaders tend to follow the footsteps of their predecessors. They are advised to learn from this staff role, grow in this command position, and operate in this context.

One day, they will be promoted, as long as they stick to the way.

However, we see that automation is changing, replacing, reshaping, and limiting those paths. We cannot expect future leaders to cope with very different structures, challenges, and ways of solving complexities without acknowledging these crucial changes. We need to rethink that path and make the adjustments today.

Unless we are in an organisation that is arrogant, slow, resistant to change, reliant on technology to do the same things faster rather than differently, and dependent on hierarchical command and control, and plans for change over years rather than months.

But for the leaders who stay in those organisations, where do they come from, and how do they develop? Successful organisations must design, select, train, and change to offer future leaders valuable opportunities that challenge and enhance their leadership skills, value human creativity, and reward their efforts.

Since 2015, there has been a series of predictions that would show AI is fundamentally changing the world. I have compiled the key steps separately, as only some things can be summarised with a few bullets. Our world continues to progress through those predictions, for good or bad, the main ones being:

• Demonstrate that AI can achieve better than human skills like translate and image recognition

• Build the infrastructure that would enable global scale and capacity with cloud storage and compute

• Construct component building blocks that would enable the adoption of AI across sectors and industries

• Democratise AI by making it easy to implement and access through packaged capabilities to generate content and output

• Interface with AI using conversational and intuitive models that empower anyone with access

• Replace mundane repeatable activities and tasks to enhance human ingenuity

• Agree that AI is changing society and that it needs international collaboration on its introduction and control

• Test AI to show that it acts in unpredictable and unintended natures

• Create common principles and approaches to develop safe and trustworthy AI

• Transition human activity in key sectors with AI alternatives that reduce costs and increase AI development

• Adopt AI in high-risk areas like security, justice, and defence to improve performance and reduce (own side) military casualties

• Use AI to develop and scale future AI performance and adoption within and across roles, functions, and sectors

• Support humanity as they transition from work that involves mundane, repeatable activities into more creative, insightful activities

• Increase digital skills to anticipate and adapt to working alongside AI toolsets.

• Develop international and national planning, funding and support for people who are no longer employed or employable

• Anticipate highly automatable sectors to help those affected transition to employment elsewhere

• Encourage that the right mindset about AI is more important for a safe long-term transition than understanding only the technical toolset

• Plan for a society that enhances human ingenuity with AI that empowers human life with value and worth

In all these cases, we have taken the easy path, taking the parts that reduce costs or deliver immediate gains, ignoring the more complex elements like international agreement, and are yet to consider the consequences in a meaningful, planned, and funded way.

We've stripped out the easy, taken the quick gains, and left future generations to pick up the bill.

This list shows how we are transforming society with the revolution of AI. This revolution also demands a radical change in the aspects of warfare and the military. The change should originate from the militaries themselves, who can harness the advantages of AI, but it will likely come from external sources, such as their new recruits or their enemies.

As an evangelist, I believe that military leaders today have a duty to prepare their command and their successors for an automated future. This is not about accepting the common view that AI will not alter the nature of warfare or that warfare is always the same.

It requires a deeper reflection on how your command could be affected and acting on those opportunities.

Sometimes, spreading this warning feels like Niels Bohr's publication on quantum atomic theory, as it is difficult for society to imagine the inevitable outcomes. Yet the world had thirty years before Oppenheimer applied those theories and started discussing destroying worlds with atomic bombs.

Today, unlike the atomic age, the research time for disruptive AI from theory to deployment is measured in months and not decades

When we ask whether AI needs leaders, we reach a key conclusion: in a world where automation has taken over simple and routine tasks, we still need leadership to tackle the most complex challenges. But how and where can our future leaders develop the skills to meet those demands?

Leadership is about preparing your teams for the future. And that is also where AI needs leadership.