Leading Through the AI Transformation: Event Insights

26 November 2024 / Article

Almost 200 business leaders gathered in Brooklyn, New York, to discuss where they are in leading the AI transformation in their companies and to benchmark their progress with other leaders.

The theme of the event was not what AI can do, but what businesses are doing with AI to solve problems and seize opportunities.

These are the best insights arising from the event, captured by AI tools and then crafted with human oversight from the team at The Conference Board.

Key Insights

Almost 200 business leaders gathered in Brooklyn, New York, to discuss where they are in leading the AI transformation in their companies and to benchmark their progress with other leaders.

The theme of the event was not what AI can do, but what businesses are doing with AI to solve problems and seize opportunities.

These are the best insights arising from the event, captured by AI tools and then crafted with human oversight from the team at The Conference Board.

Key Insights

Leadership-Driven Insights: As every enterprise function undergoes transformation through AI, leaders must seek a broad view of these changes. By assessing how AI is reshaping each functional area, cross-functional ideas that can be applied to different parts of the organization will arise.
Human-Centered Collaboration: This second pillar explores how AI becomes a co-creator, enhancing human intelligence and enabling us to do so much more together than just executing commands. AI can automate, augment, and collaborate—enabling new possibilities that can only emerge through this "co-intelligence" (a phrase coined by Ethan Mollick in his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, which is worth reading). This is not about humans vs. machines but about how humans with machines can do so much more than humans without machines.
Holistic AI Perspective: The third pillar is about embracing AI in its broadest sense. Most businesses were already exploring predictive AI and leveraging machine learning long before generative AI took the spotlight. AI is already surpassing just generative AI: AI-driven robotics, computer vision, synthetic data, agentic AI, AI scientists, and other areas of current exploration are all evolving quickly. Businesses need to take a holistic, integrated view of the tools and see where solutions can be best leveraged.