| | SEPTEMBER 202319daily work, if we can learn to use them as aids, we can become 100x more productive. Today's leaders have to encourage their employees not to see technology as a competition but more as an aid to create higher quality output.Tell us a little bit about how should a leader balance between the phenomenal promise of technology specifically AI and the ethi-cal responsibilities?The pace at which technology is evolving, government regulations at least will not be able to keep up with the advancements. And in a way it is not bad, we do not want to kill the spirit of innovation with ill-formed laws. This is where I see ethics and self-governance will play a critical role in the coming decades.No doubt, companies that bring increasing number of critical processes under automated algorithms will succeed. I feel the new generation of leaders who will be at the helm of such AI driven companies need to formulate clear ethical goals. They must ensure that the self-learning algorithms do not harm their employees and society.I want to point out three specific areas bias, transparency, and security - which today's leaders must prioritize. When it comes to bias, leaders must be technically aware of how algorithms are built inside the company. It is on the leaders to create a culture where every Machine Learning engineer confirms the training data is representing the population, compares model outputs with "real world" metrics for fairness and feels empowered to address and fix biases.As algorithms become indistinguishable from human output, companies will have to make it transparent to human users when they are dealing with automated algorithms. And lastly on security, given so much sensitive data is collected by companies today, they must implement structures to protect privacy and ensure unnecessary data is not collected. I see a learning curve for new-age leaders to come to terms with all these nuances and unfortunately there is not too much business literature to learn from and everything is evolving so rapidly.In your opinion, how do leaders themselves stay ahead of the rapid technological ad-vances? This is an interesting question. We spoke about leaders creating a culture of learning for their employees, but what about themselves. They are at the helm making important technology decisions that have a profound impact on the business. It is important they cut through the maze of myriad technology promises and make good decisions.I feel now more than ever, business leaders need to have good mental models of their business and learn to map out the use cases made possible from any new technology. And how those use cases would further the business they are running. Research the competition space more than ever. Not every modern technology is relevant for a business. Leaders will get tested to not get distracted by shiny new technologies. They must build evaluation frameworks for robust cost benefit analysis before spending. In this age of extreme tech, I feel adaptivity will differentiate between the good and the great leaders. Decisions are not one-way doors; leaders will make wrong decisions but the ability to admit and correct them fast will be key. Modern leaders must invest in developing that culture of experimentation where The first one is lifelong learning - setting aside time daily to read and keep up with new concepts, technology, ideas and be able to map them with the business goals
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