Why Intuition in Business Drives Success in the AI Era

In the next few years, artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate the business landscape, giving new significance to intuition in business. The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that generative AI will displace 29% of hours worked, with better-educated workers experiencing the most change. Despite public anxiety, AI is expected to create more jobs than it will destroy, fundamentally altering the way we work. It is up to each of us to master both AI and the change-management skills required for its adoption. Managing both AI and change effectively will necessitate strong intuition in business.

In her book, Your AI Survival Guide, former IBM and Estée Lauder executive Sol Rashidi points out that despite the capabilities of AI in processing data and generating insights, human intuition will remain a sine qua non for business leaders. In this article, we explore why intuition in business is crucial in the age of AI and delve into five reasons for the increasing importance of intuition: uncertainty, innovation, ethics, agility and purpose.

1. Intuition in business guides us through uncertainty

The way we do business is changing. Even more than six years ago, 83% of firms said that AI was a top priority, which means that changes to work processes will be even more radical than they have been since the adoption of the PC. Process reengineering, rightsizing, supply-chain management and digitalization evolved during the past 40 years. Change is increasing parabolically, and the change-management skills needed to deal with uncertainty require business intuition, emotional intelligence and interpersonal subtlety.

Implementing a new AI system is a people-and-mindset problem. Rashidi uses the term rogue leader to refer to the type of leader needed for the change management that overcomes inertia that inhibits the adoption of AI. Because AI is a people as much as a technological problem, entrepreneurs and executives need to think in new ways, disrupt familiar patterns and push boundaries. In an era of rapid progress and unpredictable technological shifts, uncertainty is the new norm, and we will need intuition to deal with it.

2. Business intuition fuels innovation

In Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, Melanie Mitchell notes that there are two kinds of AI: symbolic and sub-symbolic, or machine learning. The symbolic kind is good at logical inference, while the sub-symbolic kind is good at pattern recognition. The two are difficult to integrate, yet in today’s fast-paced business environment, integration of perception and logic is essential for staying ahead of the curve. Intuition empowers leaders to build on inferences that AI can generate to make swift and innovative decisions. AI can identify patterns and optimize processes, but the symbolic kind lacks the creative spark inherent in human intuition, while the sub-symbolic kind relies on algorithms that may not be understandable or match human aims, so they will require guidance in the foreseeable future.

3. Intuition empowers emotional intelligence and ethics

Bernard Marr’s June 2023 Forbes article on the risks of artificial intelligence notes that social and interpersonal concerns such as discrimination, privacy and ethics are paramount among the risks that AI poses. He’s not talking about HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey but rather Aristotle’s recognition that ethics requires the resolution of dilemmas and needs to create a golden mean. Neither symbolic nor sub-symbolic AI can do that.

Successful leadership hinges not only on analytical skills and emotional intelligence but also on the balancing of subtle moral concerns to arrive at optimal solutions. In his foundational book on management, The Function of the Executives, Chester Barnard concludes that the creation and balancing of moral codes is the chief function of the executive.

In his book Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, Robert Jackall describes the complex intersection of business contexts, hierarchies, ethics and practical concerns, all of which require intuition. In a related Harvard Business Review article, Jackall says that internalized rules for success do not match conventional philosophical decision rules. They are difficult and perhaps impossible to translate into machine learning systems because published information and the logic of computers do not translate into the Aristotelian balancing required in the real world. Human oversight is another sine qua non.

4. Intuition in business enables agile decision-making

There is no doubt that machine learning methods will increase the agility and creativity of AI. However, information about human intent and values is often unknown to us. Innovations are often met with skepticism and derision. Understanding the longer term and deeper range of human preferences is difficult. The economist Friedrich A. Hayek notes that the system of rules and preferences underlying the economy is not knowable in advance but is instead discovered over time through the evolution of the common law.

One example of agility was Steve Jobs, whose intuitive decision to pivot Apple’s product line toward consumer electronics culminated in the launch of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Machine learning cannot generate such unpredictable insights or grasp unexpressed preferences. Perhaps computers will eventually be able to make predictions about product launches, but human intuition will still be necessary.

5. Utilize intuitive intelligence to align with values and purpose

Business success is not solely measured in financial terms. Intuition allows leaders to balance their decisions with their personal values and purpose, creating a golden means of commercial and ethical purpose and leading to a deeper sense of satisfaction.

A poignant example is Patagonia, whose founder, Yvon Chouinard, followed his intuitive intelligence by prioritizing environmental sustainability over profits. This intuitive decision not only resonated with consumers but also positioned Patagonia as a leader in corporate social responsibility.

In conclusion, while AI offers unparalleled capabilities in data analysis and optimization and sub-symbolic AI may eventually be able to learn about ethical concerns, the human element of intuition will always be necessary to guide AI and envision possibilities beyond those that machine-learning AI can discern. By embracing intuition in business, the rogue leadership necessary to integrate AI into a business and the moral vision necessary to guide AI can be enhanced.

This article originally appeared here: Why Intuition In Business Is Important In The Age Of AI (forbes.com)

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