Liat Ben-Zur says AI is fundamentally reshaping business practices.
Liat Ben-Zur is not a huge fan of hippos, but she’s referring to senior leaders, not the semi-aquatic mammal native to sub-Saharan Africa.
Ben-Zur — who launched the first commercial GPT-4 product at Microsoft (a large multimodal model developed by OpenAI that processes and generates text and images) — says senior leaders must respect those who know how to use AI to better understand data, regardless of title.
“It used to be, and this was really common at Microsoft, that people kind of deferred to what we called hippos, the highest, most senior person,” says Ben-Zur, who grew the GPT-4 product into a $13 billion business. “A relatively junior person using AI can understand the data in a way that even the most senior people in the room give reverence to. That's a really big power dynamic shift in leadership that a lot of folks are barely aware is happening.”
Ben-Zur previously led AI transformations at Qualcomm and served as senior vice president of digital transformation at Dutch multinational health tech company Philips. She now runs LBZ Advisory LLC, a company that consults with businesses on AI strategy and product management. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The Bias Advantage: Why AI Needs the Leaders It Wasn’t Trained to See.
In early October, Formidable brought together a group of AI innovators, investors, critics and thought leaders to discuss the implications of this fast-moving new technology. During a series of wide-ranging panel discussions, we delved into trust, bias, climate change, health care and many more topics. This is the last of our four-part series featuring takeaways from these discussions. To view the full panels, please visit our YouTube page.
This keynote interview, conducted by Formidable founder and CEO Emily Parkhurst, is edited for length and clarity.
How is AI changing how business leaders are operating? AI is absolutely collapsing the distance between data and decisions, and that really changes leadership expectations.
How so? I see three big shifts that are hitting a lot of leaders between the eyes. AI is moving so fast, that if your organization has three, four, five layers of approval it’s a liability because your competitors are going to make decisions. The second is insight beats title. (Another) big shift is that judgment now beats certainty. There was this air of confidence as part of leadership, and it turns out AI could hallucinate as confidently as the most confident man you work with. AI has a lot of answers.
What you’re saying is that AI can be so confident that sometimes leaders are deferring when they shouldn’t? Not only are leaders deferring to it, but there's a bunch of studies coming out saying our IQ is potentially going down because we are not challenging ourselves enough, because it's just so easy to ask the machine and be passive. The best leaders for AI aren't necessarily the loudest. They're the ones that know how to ask the sharpest questions and know when to question the answers they get.
You use the term “leaders in the margins.” What does that mean? I've been doing a lot of work with different companies, and I started observing that the leaders most ready for the AI era tend to be the ones that have been marginalized and sidelined the most. And that's the premise of my book. A lot of the most underrepresented leaders, the ones that were not invited to the tables and the rooms were not designed for them, had to build their own playbook to get in the room. The survival skills that you built to fight your way to get to that table are exactly the skills that will create your competitive edge in an AI world today.
What action items are you asking business leaders to take away? It’s really important that you don't see AI as a threat and that you see it as the opportunity that it is. There’s a massive leadership gap. Almost all the AI big projects and conferences are pretty dominated with a very narrow cohort. AI needs new leadership. Every single industry is being disrupted by AI. AI is already shaping the future. What is still not clear is who is going to shape AI.
