📊 School and Business Leaders MUST Integrate AI

Leaders–be they school principals, college presidents, nonprofit executive directors, or Fortune 500 CEO’s–have an enormous responsibility and task ahead of them when it comes to generative AI and its role in the modern school, workforce program, or office. While the biggest mistake of all, I and many others believe, would be to ignore AI (and hope that doing so doesn’t catch up to them or their organization in the near term), there are certainly other pitfalls to watch out for. It’s still fairly early in the AI era, after all, and there are new headlines seemingly daily about the problems and biases and failures of AI. And those should be a warning to us all to embark into this space with healthy skepticism.

But there’s near universal consensus on two points concerning AI:

1. It’s here to stay (pandora’s box has been opened, like it or not)

2. It will have a gargantuan* effect on the way we learn and work, across every single industry, and in every corner of the globe.

No one with even a modicum of knowledge of previous industrial revolutions seriously doubts these two points. It would be just as ridiculous to claim, as a leader, that “I’m opposed to the internet” or “I don’t need to know anything about how the internet works or what it can do for my company.” So, what should we do with this imperfect, still emerging, problematic tool eating the world? We should learn about it and with it; help shape the public conversation so that ethics and impacts on people are prominent aspects of the discourse; and lead by example and model a praxis of experimentation anchored in care for the humans that make up schools, business, and communities. 

I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to stop job loss due to AI (another edition on that topic with some industry-specific projections is coming soon). That weighs heavily on my own mind, and I know also concerns business and school leaders, career and guidance counselors, and anyone who works with people. Which is pretty much all of us. And individually we each have little power to determine whether or not mass layoffs occur; if citizens receive a UBI (universal basic income); or other counter measures to the impacts of AI. What we can control, though, is whether or not we prepare the people we lead–the teachers, trainers, knowledge workers, and students–for the future. That’s what leaders do.

So, where do we start?

When it comes to learning and human development, we can assess readiness on a matrix of skill vs will. Do people have the skills (yet) to tackle this problem or area of work? AND Do people have the will (interest, engagement, willingness) to learn this new thing in order to tackle this problem or area of work? When it comes to AI as with most other things, we will need both will and skill–because “the best technology solutions can’t overcome a fundamental lack of skills, inclinations, beliefs, and resources in the workforce” according to Forrester. That’s why they’ve come up with the AIQ or AI quotient, and a readiness framework to help people determine if they are ready for generative AI. See below and consider how the education and business leaders in your orbit are attending to each of these four areas when preparing their teams for the future. 

From Forrester to the Aspen Institute and more, leaders are ringing the gong–loudly–that getting up to speed with generative AI isn’t optional any longer.

How can you start today (if you haven’t already) to bring generative AI to your organization and staff? How can you support your team to learn and explore these tools openly with an “exploratory mindset”?

Each week I read 50+ articles on these topics. Here were my recent favs:

🎓 Learning in the News:

• Podcast: The science of learning, teaching character, and the 9 roles of schools in America (The 74)

  • Discusses the difficulties of balancing schools’ core educational responsibilities with community care, student safety, and more

  • The speakers (briefly) wonder if the incoming of AI might shift the balance toward more human-facing roles vs the current set up in major cities with large administrative educational offices that aren’t student (or even teacher or principal)-facing

• Will AI be your next school principal? Probably not, but it’s here to stay (The 74)

  • 85% of principals reported high levels of job-related stress in 2022, vs 35% of the general working adult population.

  • AI could be a tool for principals / school admin to focus more on human tasks and automate some of the things that sap their time and energy

  • Principals and education leaders should proceed with caution as they pilot and roll out new AI tools, because of the risks of AI bias, etc.

  • Irony: The main reason principals aren’t using AI yet to help them save time? “I don’t have the time.”

• 10 best AI tools for education (Unite.AI)

  • Sneak peak: CourseHero, Gradescope, Fetchy, MathGPTPro, Cognii

💼 Workforce RoundUp:

• AI avatars are coming to the workplace: CIO’s need to prepare now (CIO)

• AI is changing the shape of leadership, how can business leaders prepare? (World Economic Forum)

  • 82% of business leaders surveyed have already deployed gen-AI or intend to in 2024

  • 95% of executives are already taking steps to ensure they have the right AI skills in their organizations

  • 44% of execs are actively upskilling themselves in generative AI

• Google releases new ‘product agnostic’ course to help with workforce upskilling (HR Brew)

  • $49 via Coursera, or free for learners enrolled in any Google career certificate program / course

  • 10 hour course is relevant to any AI tool (eg Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, etc) to help workers be more productive and tech savvy

• Bridging the gap between AI skills demand and workforce readiness (B.E. Tech News)

🍿 Other Articles and Videos Worth A Skim:

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT prompt engineering guide (OpenAI)

• Teacher arrested after using AI to falsely slander his principal with fake audio (NBC News)

  • Avoiding AI as a society isn’t an option, and won’t prevent these abuses. I strongly believe we must equip students, teachers, and business professionals with AI literacy, knowledge of deep fakes, etc.

• Revolutionizing food innovation with AI (Hormel - Inspired)

📖 Tools, Terms, & Tips:

🛠️ Tool of the Week: Udemy - an online marketplace of courses by experts and instructors from around the world. There are many courses in AI for leaders, such as this one. (Disclaimer: I haven’t completed this course yet, and don’t receive any incentives for sharing it with you; it–amongst others on Udemy– just seemed worth a glance). And they have an entire leadership program and cohort coming soon for business leaders in partnership with AWS (Amazon).

📖 Term of the Week:  Small Language Models (SLMs), as opposed to LLMs or large language models, are compact AI language tools with fewer parameters than massive LLMs, designed for specific tasks or domains. Think of them like specialized tools in a toolbox: they're less versatile but highly efficient at what they do, like powering your phone's autocomplete for fast, on-device predictions without having to send and receive data from the cloud.

🤖 GenAI Tip of the Week: Use AI for Practice Quizzes: Have AI tools generate multiple-choice practice quizzes on basic concepts covered in a lesson or unit, or just a topic you want to learn more about. This allows students to get instant feedback and repetition, freeing up teacher time for more complex support. There are free tools for this, or just use chatGPT or Gemini (etc) by copying and pasting several pages of text or uploading a PDF and ask it to generate quiz questions for you.

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