Last week I participated in a two-day workshop on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital skills. It was part of an international project on AI and digital discovery that my good friend and colleague Anthony Elliott* has been involved in developing and leading. Anthony argues that what is happening in the world today is no longer a technical revolution, but rather a technical tsunami, where the development and implementation of new technologies is so fast and wide spread that it is unlike anything we have ever experienced before. There are mind-boggling innovations being done in all kinds of areas and arenas, but few have considered what the social connotations of these innovations will be. How will they, for example, affect how we interact with each other in the future? This is something we have actually already started to see since the introduction of social media.

Well, as you can imagine, getting together with academics and practitioners for two days to discuss these issues was an exciting experience. However, there was one thing that struck me right at the start.

During the two days, we were split into groups to talk about and create an understanding of different aspects of AI and leadership and how AI will change leadership in the future. Each group was assigned one aspect of this and right then I thought, wait a minute. The question was formulated, ‘where is so and so (insert an aspect of leadership and organization) going’ but shouldn’t the question have been ‘where do we want it to go’ instead?

Because this is the way we often talk about technology, AI, and any form of innovation and development. We talk about it as something happening to us rather than something we can be involved in shaping to our needs. But the thing is, these new technologies are created for us as tools to help us in our work and every-day lives. We should be involved in talking about and affecting the direction they take – all of us, not just IT developers, coders and engineers. We need to think about what we want and need these tools to do, because yes, AI sounds like something fancy but it is in fact just a tool.

So, AI will transform social life, it already has. And we can’t stop it from happening, it is already here. But we live in a time of change and I am a firm believer that now is the time to affect in which direction we go from here, and that is something that we should all be involved in.

Which brings me to another thing that struck me in the workshop. During the two days, each group was sent on a ‘learning safari’ to get our heads around the questions at hand. My group had a Skype interview with a leader in a Swedish media organization, who had experience of AI and digital implementation. She said something that in all its simplicity was actually quite profound. She said, “I’m not afraid of AI.” The reason she isn’t afraid, is that she has been in contact with it. She has seen what it is and what it does and can do, and she has worked with it. She knows that it isn’t anything to be afraid of; that it isn’t a mystic being developed to replace us and everything human, but a tool to use and shape to our benefit.

So yes, let’s create more opportunities and get-togethers like this workshop so that people – people like you and me – can talk about what our wants, needs, and fears are for the future. Let’s make this our future. Let’s be involved in deciding how it should unfold.

*see his new book The Culture of AI