One question is occupying today's business leaders more than any other: How will your organization use AI to achieve its goals? Finding a satisfying answer to this question and putting an effective plan into place can add up to a defining moment in your company's evolution.

AI literacy among leadership is an essential skill area. When the people making decisions know what AI can accomplish for them, putting real business value ahead of hype or speculation, it can lead to organizational success. This literacy can be the difference between AI adopters allocating budget to meaningful projects and wasting it on use cases that don't get results.

Having a strong grasp of AI fundamentals and adoption strategies can also go beyond helping your company and help you distinguish yourself as a professional. Your ability to thrive in today's leadership environment may hinge on your ability to assess, plan, and execute new AI initiatives, transforming company structures to make the most of the latest technology.

Executive education provides a way to build the necessary knowledge and skill set to take your seat in the AI leadership space.

Read more: Get a glimpse of AI's real business value.

What does AI adoption mean for companies?

Adopting AI is not a one-size-fits-all process. This makes sense due to the extreme variety of companies trying the technology and the number of disparate systems that fit under the banner of "AI."

It's also true that when you ask how well a company is integrating AI, there are several different answers. It's possible to view a single organization's AI usage at three different levels:

• Firm: This represents the overall purchase, integration, and use of AI functionality. How deeply engaged is a business with AI as a whole, in terms of its priorities and business objectives?
• Function: This is a measure of how each given department of a company is integrating AI tools. Within a single business, there can be drastic differences in AI maturity and understanding between teams.
• Individual: This reflects the way individual employees are using AI in their daily work. Taking such a granular look at the everyday impact of AI technology can reveal trends and opportunities for improvement that wouldn't be visible from a more zoomed-out view.

As an executive dealing with AI adoption, you should have a strategy that will match specific capabilities under the technology's broad umbrella with your business objectives and organizational goals. Becoming a skilled AI user means focusing on practical use cases and return on investment in the present, while keeping an eye on future developments.

That balance between the present and the aspirational future is challenging but important to maintain. You'll need to discern between theoretical projects, such as the quest to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), and more prosaic AI deployment models, including automations that will help your people be more productive.

Read more: See how manufacturers are using AI.

Challenges and opportunities of AI use

Using AI within a business context is not an automatic ticket to success. Challenges facing today's companies include ethical, regulatory, and governance issues. Some of the most prominent of these potential barriers comprise:

• Bias in models: Generative AI (GenAI) models are trained on large data sets. It's important to carefully monitor the contents of this data and the way it's being used to ensure outputs don't reflect biased perspectives or harmful assumptions.
• Transparency in reasoning: Another point of caution around GenAI models is a certain black-box quality. It's harder to determine why an AI algorithm reached a specific conclusion relative to a more traditional program. This can be challenging from an AI governance and accountability standpoint.
• Responsible usage: There are numerous legal and ethical questions around the way users train their GenAI models. The use of copyrighted works has been a major point of contention, along with the copyright status of automatically generated output. Using the likenesses of real people is another issue with major implications for the future of GenAI.

For companies that commit to overcoming these challenges and building sophisticated AI programs, there are promising potential outcomes. These are the sources of ROI that leaders aim for when adopting AI and establishing AI units within their businesses. Goals to aim for include:

• Effective assistance with decision-making: AI models can ingest large amounts of information and point out patterns within the data. This allows leaders to use them as advanced big data analytics models. An AI analysis can provide insights that might have been invisible without an algorithm capable of analyzing such large and varied data sets.
• Time savings through automation: Employees may end up spending large amounts of time and effort on basic, repetitive processes that don't make effective use of their knowledge. By creating repeatable automations for these everyday tasks, powered by AI algorithms, workers can reclaim their time and focus on value-adding processes.
• Novel solutions targeting enterprise goals: One of the most intriguing aspects of tools like GenAI chatbots is their generally open-ended nature. Leaders with high levels of AI literacy can experiment with finding interesting solutions for enterprise problems driven by novel applications of the technology.

Read more: Discover how companies are making the most of AI.

How should leaders maximize the value of AI adoption?

Getting the most out of AI adoption means taking a disciplined, practical, and thoughtful approach. The most effective leaders will be those who avoid extremes, neither falling for hype nor ignoring AI's potential to aid them with key functions.

Valuable early steps in an AI adoption project will include:

• Building a roadmap: Rather than ad-libbing an AI project, executives can create an actionable roadmap with goals, checkpoints, and key performance indicators along the road to adoption. This kind of structure can keep a project from straying from its core objective and prevent moving goalposts or scope creep during AI implementation.
• Defining metrics for value: While AI is an exciting technology area with a great deal of speculation and ongoing development, impactful AI projects should still be driven by practical considerations. This means defining what success would mean for the business and rigorously measuring to determine whether AI tools are delivering value and ROI.
• Creating an AI-ready culture: AI solution adoption at all levels will be crucial to a project's overall success. If employees aren't able to use the technology effectively, it's hard to say that AI is providing positive outcomes for a given organization. A leader overseeing an AI project should make sure their people have the knowledge, support, and tools necessary to integrate AI into their daily routines and decision-making processes, all the way up to an executive level.

The most effective leaders in the AI space will be able to act as a bridge between the purely technical side of the technology and the business aspects. The ways IT teams and business employees speak about and interact with AI systems may differ, so AI literacy is a key component in getting initiatives off the drawing board and into production.

Becoming the kind of leader who can drive these efforts means adding that literacy to your tool set. Your knowledge should be both comprehensive and up to date. Considering the fast pace of AI development, you can't afford to have an outdated outlook on how the technology works. Executive education can give you the insights you need.

Read more: Discover the secrets of integrating generative AI into business processes.

Learning about AI use through executive education

MIT Sloan Executive Education offers an ideal setting for business leaders eager to build their AI literacy. This is true whether you're ready to commit to a multi-day in-person course on the MIT campus or you'd rather have a self-guided online experience in a business sprint.

The newly developed course AI Essentials: Accelerating Impactful Adoption can be a pillar of your learning experience. It's especially useful for building your aptitude and confidence before launching a major digital transformation, and for helping you stay in touch with the technical side of AI while coming from a business perspective.

The course's outcomes include: 

• Fostering a mindset that will help you harness AI to grow your business.
• Promoting an AI-friendly culture of continuous learning within your organization.
• Learning to bring AI projects from conception to execution.
• Applying best practices around governance, compliance, and AI ethics.

One of the reasons why this course and MIT Sloan Executive Education in general are so helpful is the overall focus on practical experiences. Rather than simply learning theory, you take hands-on action, including personalizing an AI Essentials Playbook that you can bring into your work in the months ahead.

By learning to prompt AI algorithms and performing simulated experiences, you can see in real-time what it's like to align technical IT aspects of AI adoption with big-picture business objective elements. By the end of the course, you'll be able to accurately describe the nuts and bolts of a given AI solution, but be able to speak about it to non-technical users.

Read more: Learn how AI can catalyze business creativity.

Take action in adding AI literacy to your skill set

Whether you're most excited about excelling in a current role, aiming for a promotion, or building an executive-level resume, it pays to know all about the latest developments in AI. Enrolling in a course from MIT Sloan Executive Education allows you to fuel your aptitude and knowledge in practical, up-to-date ways, with courses led by the top thinkers in the space.

Taking a hands-on approach to learning and addressing your company's real challenges and demands through AI can deepen your engagement with the technology, allowing you to bridge the gap between your IT team and business leaders. This is the experience you receive when you choose high-level executive education.

Enroll in AI Essentials: Accelerating Impactful Adoption and build this essential skill.