CEOs must soldier on even as AI anxieties loom

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Chief executive officers keep getting new jobs piled onto their shoulders. The economic rise of China since the 1980s meant that they had to become Sinologists. The twin populist shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump's presidential ascension meant that they had to think about the capitalist system's legitimacy. Now, with the next tech revolution at warp speed, they are having to become experts on artificial intelligence. It's almost as if they're underpaid.

During the China era, CEOs tried (at the very least) to master a few words of Mandarin. Today, they're sprinkling AI-speak into their conversations: foundation models, large language models, hallucinations and the lot. And they're desperately boning up on the latest books and obediently trooping to classes run by consultancies such as McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group. Gonzalo Gortazar, CEO of CaixaBank SA, sums up the mood in the C-suite: “Generative AI models surprise, impress and scare us, all at the same time.”

The speed of change is neck-wrenching. ChatGPT was released less than a year ago, on Nov. 30, 2022, reaching 100 million users in just two months. An International Business Machines Corp. survey of 3,000 CEOs found that 43% said their firms were using generative AI to make strategic business decisions, and 75% believed that it would eventually give their companies a competitive edge. A McKinsey survey found that a third of respondents said their companies were regularly using AI for at least one business function.

The technology has been developing quietly for years. But it was the arrival of generative AI — capable of producing text, images or other media — that seized public attention and the C-suite by the throat. Generative AI possesses general