AI Misuse vs Proper Use: What CEOs Get Wrong Without Realizing It

Read time: 2.5 minutes

AI Misuse vs Proper Use for CEOs and Founders:

1. Relying on AI to make your choices vs. utilizing AI to help challenge and verify your decisions.

Misuse: Making obligations on a system.
Proper use: Creating obligation.

2. Allowing AI to generate your choice vs. remaining in charge of your choices with the same authority.

Misuse: Taking an answer from AI as the final decision.
Proper use: Your authority to make the decision, then using AI as a framing tool to understand potential consequences.

3. Using AI while fatigued to support a pattern vs. disciplined use of AI for patterns.

Misuse: Dependent on AI for good decisions in times of fatigue or crisis.
Proper use: No AI influencing your decisions when you are unable to use sound judgment.

4. Prioritize AI speed vs. respect for the importance of sound judgment and thorough discovery of implications.

Misuse: Rushing AI outputs into the hands of decision-makers such as boards or investors.
Proper use: Require the delay of an AI decision until ramifications have been reviewed by decision-makers.

5. Assuming confident answers are accurate vs. validate/blocking AI-generated answers.

Misuse: Relying on the appearance (polished) of an AI-generated response before validating its accuracy.
Proper use:  Require the source documents for AI-generated responses before relying on them. Alternatively, block access to AI-generated responses until an accurate source document is identified.

6. Forcing certainty vs. mapping uncertainty.

Misuse: Relying on AI to provide an answer.
Proper use: Use AI to help you identify and analyze possible scenarios, evaluate possible tradeoffs, and identify possible edge cases.

7. Wanting others to have difficult conversations vs. being honest with ourselves and having those hard conversations.

Misuse: Having someone else give us an opinion.
Proper use: Be prepared to speak with AI to give honest feedback to someone else.

8. Seeing AI as Impartial vs. having defined governance for it.

Misuse: Assuming that AI is an objective source of information.
Proper use: Develop, implement and monitor standards regarding bias, risk and escalation like you would for any core information system.

9. Prompting AI without a Point of View vs. using a thesis to guide AI evaluations.

Misuse: Asking open or vague questions of AI.
Proper use: Start every engagement with AI by having a written point of view.

10. Blaming AI later vs. taking responsibility for the outcome.

Misuse: "It was the model’s fault."
Proper use: If the AI model influenced the decision, leadership has made the final decision and will sign off on that decision.

💡Key Takeaway: 

AI will not replace CEOs... they will be brought into the light by AI. Each time an executive uses a shortcut, hesitates, or abdicates, a decision is amplified by a system that does not question itself.