Ctrl + Pretend: Are Top Executives Faking AI Skills Too?

The top-level executive slid into his seat. For the next hour, he struggled to look as if he were closely following the conversation. And though he chimed in with a question during the one part of the conversation he understood, he knew he was faking it.

It’s no surprise that, according to numerous surveys, the vast majority of rank-and-file workers are still lagging in their AI knowledge and use. But perhaps they can take comfort in knowing that some folks in the C-suite have the same issue: According to a new survey, just 44% of CEOs feel that their chief information officer is “AI savvy”—a shocking figure, given the role’s importance to a firm’s AI success. Indeed, experts say that playacting deep AI knowledge in the C-suite is the new “pretending to have read the memo.” “It is moving so fast that CEOs may need to temper their definition of subject-matter expertise,” says Bryan Ackermann, head of AI strategy and transformation at Korn Ferry.

For the most part, executives can’t be faulted for this. For decades, major tech shifts landed every three or four or five years, shifting team focus from, say, cloud computing to mobile apps. This cadence gave teams time to learn, implement, and iterate before the next wave hit. Today, AI is moving in a cycle of weeks, allowing stragglers no time to catch up. And unlike earlier business technologies, which were mostly tools that did what they were told to do, AI can generate unanticipated outputs—requiring a new set of oversight skills. Unless keeping track of AI breakthroughs is someone’s full-time job, it’s impossible not to immediately fall behind, and that’s the challenge facing C-suites. “I’m inclined to be gentler with this population, because I know what it takes to keep up,” says Ackermann, who readily admits to using AI to ask questions about AI. “I do it all the time.” 

Others argue that the C-suite still has no excuse, given that firms are investing their very future in the success of AI, not to mention spending billions on it and cutting jobs because of it. For their part, employees have been faking AI knowledge for years, trusting that the executives leading AI initiatives knew their stuff. But when everyone is figuring things out as they go, AI expertise can get dicey. Boards have a fiduciary duty to make sure that executives are well-prepared. “It’s a slippery slope,” says board and CEO services expert Alan Guarino, vice chairman at Korn Ferry. He suggests that board agendas include a quarterly report from management on how they are assessing leaders for readiness in the era of AI.

A further complication is that AI savvy “means different things to different people,” says technology expert Paul Fogel, senior client partner in the Software practice at Korn Ferry. “CEOs don’t have to be tech savvy.” There’s a broad consensus that AI knowledge is essential: 77% of global executives believe that it will define the coming business era, according to the Gartner survey. What’s emerging is the old applied-knowledge argument: Do you really need to know how to build a car in order to oversee an auto company?

Experts advise that boards pay attention—but avoid overstepping. “They need to have their noses in and hands off,” says Guarino. That means asking the right questions, listening to the answers, and deciding whether the company is being diligent. “They should not actively meddle,” he notes.

In the meantime, CEOs can keep thinking about broad strategy and business growth, rather than the specific tools that might generate it—while leaning on CTOs and CIOs for AI’s likely outcomes and ROIs. The good news is that a breaking point will likely soon emerge: It’s no longer necessary to pretend to understand. “Having super in-depth knowledge of how an MCP server connects to a database is not really the business problem,” says Ackermann.

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