The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work by David De Cremer.
David holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Southampton, UK. He is Dean of Northeastern University’s School of Business, and the previous chair in management studies at the University of Cambridge UK. He is also a visiting professor at London Business School and China Europe International Business School.
In addition, David is the founder of the Erasmus Behavioral Ethics Centre at the Rotterdam School of Management. He remains an honorary fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School and a fellow at St. Edmunds college, Cambridge University. He is also a research member of The Justice Collaboratory at Yale’s Law School.
David is pulling no punches on his predictions that AI will transform society including organizational leadership. However his focus is on a human-centered approach to AI leadership. His position for leaders: emphasize ethical and strategic integrations of AI into their organizations. If not, AI will get the best of you. There is plenty of recent data to back up his claims.
Simply put: Ignore this book at your own peril
David is certainly indicating that organizational leaders have traditionally deflected their role regarding digital transformation to their technology teams. However this also deflects investment decisions with teams which may not have a full view of the organization. So, leaders are not stepping up to understand and execute in the new world of Artificial Intelligence.
Again, pulling no punches, a generation of digital transformational failures awaits any leader who simply does not connect their own personal understanding of AI to their organizational strategies.
His book will show leaders how to approach their official deployments of AI across their organizational units. Yet perhaps more importantly they must retake control of their organization’s ‘Shadow IT’ which is signing and deploying AI under the radar which can only lead to the wild failures that will impact organizations deeply with little to no recovery time in face of their competition.
David outlines nine actions leaders must take to successfully guide their organization’s digital transformation to an AI-focused future. When executed successfully, it will lead to growth for their organization and employees. Perhaps just as important is David’s experience with many early adopters who in fact failed to deploy AI successfully. Gartner has identified over 85% failures in 2024 alone. So understand the impact of his message yet?
Leadership must look beyond a single book. The collection below are considered key sources for establishing the required knowledge to empower success across your organization:
In conclusion, David has written a must read for any organization leader. He offers a deep analysis of emerging complex ethical concerns regarding AI, including issues of bias, privacy, misuse, accountability, and responsibility. The AI-Savvy Leader is providing leaders with a very workable roadmap. Perhaps another one of the books that you can ignore at your own peril.