Why This Book

Is artificial intelligence (AI) just another hype that will become part of the overall technology fabric of an organisation without creating radical disruptions? Will organisations embrace it so completely that the role of people and leadership comes into serious question? And is the horror scenario where super-intelligent machines take over our lives and work and make human capabilities just a pawn in a larger game likely to come true? There are no answers to all this yet, but AI is surely raising many questions in the minds of governments, corporations and social thinkers. Leaders of today and leadership aspirants of the future need to take notice and look for possible answers that will shape their future destiny.

When we look beyond the clichés like ‘the only people who will lose their jobs to AI will be those who don’t know how to work with AI’ and ‘the human in the loop will always stay in control of AI’, some very real scenarios emerge. Quess Corp, a leader in staffing solutions in a variety of industries from business process outsourcing to manufacturing, has spun off an entity called Digitide Solutions, which already has an employee base of over 50,000. The workforce includes AI agents, and the company is also planning to manage this new kind of labour force that won’t call in sick or lose productivity because of external factors.1 They are one among many companies that view AI as a potential game changer and are prepared to rearchitect the business and redesign around new roles that are part human and part AI agents. Roles like chief listening officer will ensure that performance of the AI agents is optimised and they become an important part of future work design. While Digitide has focused on the key verticals of insurance, healthcare and financial services, Honeywell Inc., a multibillion dollar global corporation, has designed multiple innovations in its automation businesses. A recent visit to their Process Solutions headquarters in Houston, United States of America, showed us how large process plants can be designed, operated and managed through comprehensive automation with AI at the edge for analysing, predicting, prescribing and optimising the performance of the facility with minimal human intervention. There are many more such examples of organisations that are experiencing and enabling comprehensive transformation in business models and are excited about the future.

What does all this mean for leadership approaches and methods that humans have evolved through the ages? Will we all need to go back to business schools and get reskilled and reoriented in the ways new organisations will need to function and how our roles and, indeed, styles must change? In a recent talk, the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari spoke about the need for human trust to be enhanced lest AI in its super-intelligence avatar ends up exploiting the human divide and takes the opportunity to rule.2 In the complex world of barriers and geopolitics we live in today, rebuilding trust between humans, which is a prerequisite to retaining command over AI agents, is an agenda that will take some doing. In their book Genome to Om, Bhushan Patwardhan and Indu Ramchandani have indicated that true leaders will be able to navigate the entities they lead through a transition from specialised external knowledge that can be vested in AIs that have gone through extensive training by large language models (LLMs) to supreme inner knowledge that does not get swayed by sudden disruptions but continues to design for the future.3 The comprehensive knowledge that would be desired from true leaders of the future comes from a combination of anubhava, which is experiential knowledge derived through observation, experimentation and analysis, and anubhuti, the response that comes through intuition and a sense of connection. The authors call this the move from modern science to meta-science. The willingness and ability of next-generation leaders to lead a recalibration in the future progress of society from science to sustainable universal well-being is what the authors call ‘genome to Om’! For the leaders who are readers of this book, this is truly an aspirational state of self-actualisation.

If there is so much confusion prevailing about the future of AI, with contradicting views about its future impact on all sides of the disbelief to fear spectrum of responses, why have we written this book for you? In a previous book, also published by Bloomsbury at the peak of the hype on digital transformation, we had presented the various aspects of technology, processes, culture and leadership that lead to true digital success. We have noticed the same hype cycle with all new technologies, from the early days of personal computing to cloud and software as a service (SaaS) to digital transformation and, more recently, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality and metaverse. Many of these have gone through the initial stages of industry hype and mostly perished or become subdued in the trough of disillusionment that follows. A few have stayed the course to ascend the slope of enlightened growth. We believe that AI has the potential to result in enlightened growth for leaders and organisations, and it is wise leaders who will, within a few years, redefine the high impact phase in ways that might well exceed the current frontiers of our imagination.

There is one aspect of the future that we are confident about—the coexistence of leading-edge AI with thoughtful and deliberate human intelligence to create better outcomes by retaining ultimate control for the ‘human in the loop’. Your authors have coined a phrase called ‘dual intelligence’ as the characteristic of all wise and successful organisations of the future, and it is our mission to ensure that thoughtful readers of this book, particularly adopters of AI and leaders of the present and the future, understand how dual intelligence can be developed, honed and practised.

We are not soothsayers, and while we can predict many opportunities and outcomes, we do not attempt to put a stake in the ground to say ‘this is what will be’. Instead, this book will take you on a learning journey to enable you to read, reflect, put some ideas into practice and develop comfort and a level of mastery in navigating unexpected incremental and disruptive technology shifts and, in many cases, creating a better future for the organisation and all its stakeholders.

We have chosen to stay away from diving too deep into the technology hype that always surrounds AI and its many avatars and inventors—from the multi-trillion-dollar-valued Nvidia to the massively hyped OpenAI and ChatGPT and similar generative AI (GenAI) products to the quiet ascent of DeepSeek and other non-American innovations that have come into the market. Instead, we approach every discussion in the book through a leadership lens so that leaders can absorb what they need to know about the history and current state of the art in technology, applications, and impact on work and life and develop their own approach to leadership for the future.

We are hopeful that the future will continue to belong to the human race. As you read on, we invite you to share that confidence!