En el 2025 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, muchos líderes tecnológicos y empresariales expresaron las mismas frustraciones: iniciativas de IA que no aportan valor comercial, proyectos piloto que nunca llegaron a producción y su lucha constante por descubrir qué está fallando.
00:00Hi, I'm Lorianne McLaughlin, Senior Editor Digital at MIT Sloan Management Review.
00:11Here at the 2025 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, the focus is on AI strategy.
00:19AI strategy involves everything from making technology stacked choices,
00:24to organizing teams, to helping people manage a great deal of change.
00:29Leaders here want to learn from each other's successes and mistakes.
00:33So we asked AI experts and leading CIOs,
00:38what is a common mistake that leaders frequently make when shaping AI strategy?
00:43Here's what they had to say.
00:50The biggest mistake I'm seeing right now that leaders are making is overestimating how good AI is.
00:57And so you set out these great ambitious pieces and they don't quite happen.
01:02So for example, I keep hearing the low hanging fruit, it's not really as low as we think it is.
01:07So the goal is to figure out what's possible, but then incrementally build your capability and reduce your risk to get there.
01:15The one mistake that we can make and hopefully we're not making is treating this as a tool that needs to be implemented.
01:23Yes, it is a technology. However, this is an incredible inflection point in time.
01:30And so we have to consider it so much more than that.
01:32Rather, you should think about this as an opportunity to change the way that the business operates,
01:40the way you ask questions, the way you even operate a team.
01:44And so to do that, you need a cross-functional team.
01:48You need to think about this more broadly across your entire organization.
01:52You need to think about culture.
01:53There's a lot of activation that needs to happen in order for this to actually materialize all the value that we anticipate it can have.
02:03Treating this as an inflection point and changing the way you work and think and operate means you have to involve everyone.
02:10All right. So I think one mistake that leaders make when shaping an AI strategy is inserting AI into kind of this idealized vision of the work and the actual work of their organization.
02:24It's gnarlier. It's grittier. It's messier.
02:27And unless we insert AI into this version, the real version, it's not going to be effective.
02:31One mistake that business and technology leaders make in terms of shaping their AI strategies now is too limited experimentation.
02:42One of the big problems that we have with AI is lots and lots of pilots, proofs of concepts, experiments, but not that many production deployments.
02:52And the only way you get economic value from AI is through deploying it into production.
02:58One of the major pitfalls I see today is that leaders are actually not moving fast enough.
03:07We know that employees are three times more willing and excited to leverage AI in the workplace than their leaders expect.
03:15Even the skeptical ones actually embrace AI and have leveraged AI in the workplace.
03:21It is, in fact, most often the disagreement amongst the executive team that is holding organizations back from leveraging AI in the workplace effectively.
03:32So the one thing that I would point to is try and create alignment quickly so that you can move at pace in line with your employees' expectations and their excitement to leverage AI.
03:42I think one of the major mistakes is to not consider that at the end any transformation across the entire company, any real intervention that converts that into a strategy is always connected with the human factor.
03:55Technology is a pivotal element.
03:57Keep in mind that those three elements are needed.
04:00Technology, data, that is feeding all the processes and the human factor as a critical element in order to really achieve the change and the scale in the adoption.
04:09One mistake that I think business and technology leaders make when thinking about their AI strategy is they really don't know how to evaluate the potential risk that they're introducing in their business, particularly cybersecurity risk.
04:23We want to make sure that as we bring these new tools and these new approaches into our business, that we think about not only what are the risks, what are the vulnerabilities that we've introduced, but we also want to think about how can we be resilient.
04:36We can't stop all vulnerabilities from happening, particularly when we're online, when we're using technologies in new and novel ways, but what we can do is put some processes in place so that if and when something happens, we can recover quickly and we can get back on track.
04:53We can be resilient.
04:54In my empirical opinion and observation, working in exec ed and in an advisory capacity, the single biggest mistake that organizations make deploying AI is that they're using it to solve the problem.
05:10Instead of learning about the capabilities and the potential of the AI, they say, this is what we think the AI can do.
05:17This is what we think the problem is.
05:19How do we align them to better solve the problem?
05:22I'm not going to accuse these people of being lazy, but I will accuse them of not being curious enough and innovative enough to take advantage of their own capabilities as well as AI capabilities.
05:34So I think one common mistake around thinking about AI is to think about AI is to think about this as a tool or a technology.
05:44I think it's really a new way of working and new way of operating, and that's how we need to think.
05:50We have to completely reimagine the business, reimagine the experiences.
05:54Every dollar we spend on technology should be designed and spent in a way that it is building towards that future experience, which is going to look very different from what it is today.
06:05What part of AI strategy do you find most challenging?
06:09Tell us in the comments below.
06:11And for more wisdom on AI strategy and leadership, please see our curated playlist.
