What Do Executives Know AboutAI?

Chris Kieff and I have been collaborating on our book-in-progress for a while now, and hopefully, we will soon start posting sample chapters for your feedback.

For now, we are sticking with the working title of "The AI Era." Our subtitle seems to be a constantly changing element. For today it is, "How Business Will Thrive in These Disruptive Times."

We admit it lacks a certain pizzaz, but it does accurately say what our book is about and who it is for. Perhaps one of our friends and followers will suggest something better: we are big believers in crowd wisdom.

This brings me to why I am posting right now: We are trying to figure out what our target reader already knows about AI and work --or will know 6-12 months from today when AI Era gets published.

We are using the same business model to write this new book that I used in 2006 with Naked Conversations was written. At the time social media was highly controversial in business. Some bloggers were being fired for blogging on company time, and traditional media was publishing onerous speculations on what damages industry blogs could generate.

Our approach was to write about tech business for all other businesses. Our focus on technology was to write about what does for business, not how it is made or works. Our style was to simplify the complex without dumbing it down

And that is what Chris and I want to do now, but the world has changed significantly in the past 15 years. And business executives know a lot more about technology than they did back then. Most companies are already using AI today, but not anywhere near the level it will soon need to use.

This creates a puzzle for Chris and me. We just don't know how much executives in various industries such as manufacturing, processed foods, transportation, or anything else that is not tech-centric already know.

We have been trying to find some sort of demographic that would give us some sense of how and where AI is being adopted and what is generally known that we can skip over.

Two examples:

1. Do we need to explain that AI is not sentient and has no emotions or do most business decision-makers already know that?

2. Do most business leaders understand that the possibility of AI turning against humanity makes for good science fiction content, but, in reality, is scientifically impossible?

3. Do they generally understand that AI is going to reduce the number of jobs that exist today and whether it will replace them with new and better, jobs is not necessarily what will happen?

We are big believers in crowd wisdom and plan to make AI Era a better book by gathering feedback from our readers and followers.

We are reaching out now for your thoughts on what non-technical business decision-makers already know about AI and what they still need to know.

You can answer us by answering here, or if you wish, by old-fashioned email: shel@shelisrael.com.