MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Why Executives Can't Get Comfortable With AI

Executives need to have an understanding of information technology in order to derive business value from it and to productively interact with IT professionals. Nevertheless, IT experts have long lamented many executives’ limited knowledge of IT’s underlying functionality. In turn, many executives have (often unconsciously) declined to develop such IT literacy, preferring instead to focus their time and attention on domain and business matters.

However, recent evidence indicates that organizations that successfully unlock the strategic potential of artificial intelligence have executives and leaders who embody the opposite instinct: These leaders do have deeper knowledge of AI’s functionality.

About the Author

Marc Pinski is an information systems researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. Monideepa Tarafdar is the Charles J. Dockendorff Endowed Professor of Information Systems at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management. Alexander Benlian is the Chaired Professor of Information Systems and Electronic Services at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

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