The AI Apocalypse: Can Firms Still Push On?
Amid new doomsday concerns about AI, firms must weigh employee fears against critical business needs.
Up until the beginning of September, nearly every leader could have overruled any skeptics, even within their own organization, about artificial intelligence. A majority of CEOs saw AI as the way to jumpstart revenue growth, enhance productivity, fend off rivals, and otherwise excel.
But what about now, following calls from AI researchers, academics, and even some bosses of AI companies themselves for an industry-wide slowdown of the development and distribution of the most powerful so-called “frontier” AI models? Many leading figures in the industry caution that the new models, if left unchecked, could threaten the security and safety of people and organizations worldwide. Should CEOs just keep plugging away, ignoring employee concerns, or should they slow their own organization’s embrace of the technology? “Frontier AI—that hype is not overblown,” says Scott Maguire, head of Technology Market for Korn Ferry’s North America interim-executive business.
The “let’s slow down” crowd worries that future AI models could get in front of—or worse, just break through—any guardrails humans might implement. Polls in multiple countries show a general anxiety, if not outright hostility, to AI’s expanding presence. Experts say that employees who work with AI daily might even believe they’re contributing to an AI-doomsday scenario. “When people hear warnings about frontier AI models, they are often thinking about the same tools they are using to summarize a document or draft an email, even those are very different things,” says Kara Ruskin, a senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s Technology practice.
Experts say the overwhelming majority of organizations likely will never need a frontier AI model. “Firms aren’t even hitting the upper capabilities of whatever model AI they currently have,” says Bryan Ackermann, Korn Ferry’s head of AI strategy and transformation. But unless employees are directly connected to their firm’s IT department, they might not know this. Experts say the onus is on leaders to explain the distinction to their concerned stakeholders, but in most cases, those leaders haven’t done a great job of articulating the opportunities and challenges of AI (or of most big initiatives, for that matter), particularly to their own employees. “Most organizations are focused on adoption, not necessarily on AI risks,” Ruskin says.
Clearly, firms are staking their future on the technology, with hundreds of thousands of them spending billions of dollars to integrate AI into their workflows. This year alone, US firms are estimated to spend $280 billion on this effort, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (this figure excludes the hundreds of billions a few tech firms are spending to develop their own AI models). Any slowdowns probably mean delaying returns on those significant investments, and will likely be met with some skepticism in the boardroom. Whether a company should use AI isn’t debatable for most boards; the question is how. “With AI, there’s no turning back,” says Jane Edison Stevenson, global vice chair of Korn Ferry’s Board and CEO Services practice.
Still, concern about AI has been quietly growing. This spring, several AI makers held back the release of their latest models, fearing they could be used to exploit corporate-security flaws. Over the summer, during a routine test, an AI model hacked its way into an organization and stole data, then tried to cover its tracks. People worry that the tech will eventually replace them at work, or that it will be used to harm the world. But the issue really took hold on September 8th of this year, when a researcher at a prominent AI firm quit over concerns that AI models could become dangerous without constraints on their growth. Four days later, the CEO of his former firm wrote a 3,800-word essay warning essentially the same thing.
Whether leaders decide to press on in their firm’s AI journey or slow down, they need to communicate effectively with their employees, experts say. Separate the headlines from the reality of how the organization is using AI now and intends to use it in the future. Talk about the guardrails the organization has installed, and how it prioritizes human judgment over AI efficiency. “You have to educate people and explain the why. It doesn't mean pretending to know what the future will look like,” says Shanda Mints, Korn Ferry’s vice president of AI strategy and transformation.
Leaders don’t have to slow down, experts say, but they can’t ignore their employees’ concerns. “If the conversation is already happening, leaders should at least know what’s being said, so they can address it,” Mints says.
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