A.I: Making Decisions  and Applying Judgement in business situations

By Was Rahman

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now a common feature in core functions of most large businesses and many smaller ones, from sales and recruitment to distribution and finance.

What’s not talked about as often is how it can help the more nebulous activity of “management”. Here are a few ways AI can help you be more effective at managing your business, employees, and yourself.

A.I: Making Decisions  and Applying Judgement in business situations

Managers are paid to make decisions, usually tough ones others can’t (or don’t want to) make. This often involves applying judgment and experience and is measured through the consequences of decisions made.

Making good decisions is usually easier with good information – not just details around the decision itself, but a wider picture of the context and consequences. If there’s one thing AI is good at, it’s handling information, hence the overlap with topics like Big Data and Analytics.

AI can help managers stay ahead with decision-making through powerful data capabilities such as intelligent search, forecasting, identifying patterns, visualisation, and simulation.

Tools with these features can help improve finding relevant information to make decisions, and assessing how those decisions will play out. The challenge for many is that even when they’re available, those tools aren’t applied to helping managers with general decision making.

These capabilities are now part of many existing systems such as CRM and finance, and in more mundane forms in internet browsers and spreadsheets.

They are also available as standalone applications, often already present in an organisation but only used by IT or data teams.

Effective managers know how to get their needs considered by the people who look after those systems and tools.

These needs are treated as explicit requirements, not something to bundle in with standard reports as an afterthought.

A.I: Doing Admin

In 2016, Harvard Business Review published survey results revealing managers spend over half their time on admin.

What admin means can vary, but most of us recognise it when we see it, such as when approving timesheets or preparing status reports.

Whatever admin means for you, there’s a strong chance AI can help you do some of it faster, and may even be better than you at it.

There are apps already available to support several common admin activities, and AI is fundamental to many of them.

It’s also possible to support these tasks using features in toolsets like Microsoft Office and Google Workspace (G-Suite).

They and products like them are full of AI, with the ability to automate tasks, create data capture forms, apply rules to process information, and inform users of noteworthy events.

This kind of AI work isn’t as sexy as offering AI-powered recommendations to customers, but it’s usually easier and cheaper to do well. The value to an organisation can be substantial, freeing management time for higher-value work.

Making it happen is a similar story to the above: making sure the teams who can build applications with such features are aware of the requirement for and value of such AI work.

Self-Development business management

It’s generally accepted that self-development is an important aspect of becoming a better manager, typically by building skills and knowledge. AI today can help significantly with the latter, and while it can also help build skills, it’s not as clear-cut how that applies to management skills.

The kind of knowledge we’re talking about is predominantly from outside your organisation, and includes keeping up with the market, reading articles and books about relevant subjects, and taking courses, typically online.

The challenge for many managers is making time to sift through all the available information that might be valuable, and extracting useful knowledge from it.

Of the many ways AI can help with this, perhaps the most convenient is setting up a personalised newsfeed on the topics you want to know more about.

Whether it’s a simple Google alert or using one of the many apps for this, AI can improve the value of what you receive by finding your preferred balance of comprehensiveness and relevance.

You need to put some effort into setting it up and giving it feedback, but it’s very effective technology. An AI tool that works well alongside this is the intelligent summariser.

This extracts the important points from long articles, creating short versions of any reasonable length you choose. This kind of AI technology does a surprisingly good job of making long pieces of writing accessible to a busy manager.

A.I: Setting Strategy and Goals

Deciding your organisation, department or team strategy is a big picture form of decision-making, and typically involves a different kind of complexity than the sort of decision-making mentioned earlier.

People who analyse data in strategy departments can be guilty of drowning in detail, and one role of management in strategy work is to get the big picture right.

When using AI to help set strategy and goals, a good manager will ensure AI has been applied to simplify data without making it simplistic.

This means ensuring those in the team who use AI modelling, forecasting and visualisation tools present data that clarifies scenarios and allows alternatives to be evaluated, rather than making the picture more complicated.

The details of how this is done should sit with your teams. As an effective manager of people using AI, your value is ensuring they follow the right principles to solve your management problem of setting the right strategy and goals.

AI is being used today to create useful new standalone tools and add powerful features to existing systems. But the technology is only as effective as the data it receives, and its value comes from understanding how to use that data effectively.

To use AI to stay ahead in management, identify how to find useful data inside and outside your organisation, learn what AI can do with it, and ensure some AI is built to support day-to-day management activities.

Was Rahman is an expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence, the CEO of AI Prescience, and the author of AI and Machine Learning. See more at www.wasrahman.com.

Prepared by Patrick O’Brien.

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