What Leaders Need to Make the Most of AI

Survey after survey has made clear that organizations, including associations, are increasingly comfortable with AI. Less clear, though, is how willing those associations are supposed  to get behind building and supporting the kinds of robust AI tools that can address member needs.

A recent report from Sequence Consulting attempted to push association leaders to do more, faster, and get out of “pilot mode”: “AI is transforming how associations make decisions, not just how they perform tasks,” the report says. “Leaders must move from pilots to production  (opens in a new tab) by embedding AI into the systems that drive member experience.”

Getting there, though, will require leaders getting more comfortable with the kind of decision-making that such an acceleration requires. And as a recent commentary from McKinsey explains, it helps when leaders grasp what AI can and can’t replace  (opens in a new tab).

According to the article, leaders should find AI freeing instead of limiting; it allows them to focus on the fully human aspects of their work. AI “still can’t do the hard work of leadership itself. Generative AI cannot set aspirations, make tough calls, build trust among stakeholders, hold team members accountable, or generate truly new ideas.”

The full article is a quick run-through of the demands being made of leaders in the AI age: They’re responsible for setting organizational goals, demonstrating values, thinking big—and recruiting others in the organization to do the same. 

So the big changes that AI promises can’t come to fruition without the confidence of leaders to get behind it, and support for the people who are engaged in it. We know that organizations aren’t doing as much as they could in terms of training their people. Some groups, like the Missouri State Teachers Association, have offered financial incentives (opens in a new tab) to employees to make sure that they’re well versed in the technology. Whatever works, works, but the numbers suggest that the more informed people are around the tools, the more confident they are with it. 

So the organization’s leader will have to do the same thing—get comfortable with the technology to do a better job of identifying where growth opportunities are. “The AI models that leaders are using are inference engines, optimized to generate the next most probable continuation of patterns the models have seen,” the McKinsey report says. “But only human leaders can recognize when AI outputs will lead to actual breakthroughs for an organization.”

“Don’t be afraid,” MSTA CEO Bruce Moe told me. “Let your team experiment and learn on their own to the extent possible, because the ways that the technology can be used are not necessarily things that I would see from where I sit or even think of. Make the opportunity as broad as you reasonably can, because you never know where your evangelists for the use cases will come from.”

Leaders aren’t always the source of brilliant ideas—but they should be the facilitators of others’. That capacity, in the age of AI, is more urgent than ever.