adapt as leaders, along with their executive team, to uncover new opportunities in the aftermath. Business evolution isn’t a one-off event, it’s an attitude. In order to drive enduring success, during a difficult financial period business leaders need to remain agile enough to assess, align and act when opportunities arise. As Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”, once said: “Technology happens because it is possible”. The rapid development of AI between 2012 and 2023 shows just how much the technology has grown. The release of ChatGPT last autumn has only worked to spike interest as AI becomes more accessible for all, unleashing incredible potential in individual productivity and business performance. Within the last ten years computers have become more powerful by a factor of 100 million. This increased processing power enabled AI models to become better trained, and to process a great deal more data. What’s more, in 2012 AI models were trained on specific data sets, covering around 150GB of data in total. In 2023, they were able to access the entire internet: an estimated 10,000GB of data to work with. Looking at the data from the latest Vistage Confidence Index the majority of executives leveraging AI, are using it towards operations (46%) and sales and marketing (45%). Interestingly, only 20% are using AI technology in talent management and hiring, with more than half of respondents (51%) believing that these solutions will have no impact on personnel. Just 6% of business leaders believe that AI applications will replace staff and 13% claim it will reduce staff numbers. The value of AI will drive individual productivity just as tools like Microsoft Excel did for ledgers. A worker’s ability to leverage AI in their job will quickly move from a competitive advantage to a role requirement. It will have broad corporate value meshing massive amounts of business data into previously unseen patterns. What it won’t do is make critical, strategic business decisions. That still demands a leader’s instincts, judgment and perspectives…for now. Growth goes one way, but change takes you anywhere. For businesses of all sizes and across all sectors, that’s what technology – and specifically AI – is currently doing, and will continue to do at a rapid pace. Are you ready? In any case, growing forward in the Aftermath Economy will be hard. It will likely take 18 to 24 months before we find the path to the next growth cycle. Until then, CEOs will need to adhere to the disciplines of finance, focus on the principles of business execution, embrace an evolved workforce and provide them with a high-performance workplace. CEOs will also need to adapt as leaders along with their executive teams to uncover opportunities in the aftermath.
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