While there’s no evidence that business leaders are outsourcing the most important decisions to AI, there are reports that many executives are relying on AI to make many — in fact, most — of their decisions. The implications for communications could be huge.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode 512 of For Immediate Release. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. The inspiration for this week’s report came from a post Brian Solis wrote recently. In it, he argued that AI isn’t just changing work — it’s rewiring how executives make decisions. Once Brian put that in my head, the trend started standing out in other things I was seeing. I’ll summarize the numbers and what they mean for communicators right after this.

The numbers Brian pulled together are honestly alarming. A Confluent study of UK private sector leaders found that 62% of executives now use AI to make the majority of their decisions. That’s not some — it’s the majority. 70% say they second-guess themselves when AI disagrees with them, and 46% say they rely on AI more than their own colleagues.

On the U.S. side, SAP’s research found that 44% of C-suite executives would reverse a decision they had already planned to make based on AI input. 74% place more confidence in AI advice than in the advice they get from family and friends. Meanwhile, McKinsey reports that 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investment over the next three years, but only 1% — 1 percent — describe themselves as mature in deployment. The money to pay for AI and a sort of blind trust in its abilities are racing ahead of the internal competence to use it. Now, I want to be clear before I go on. I’m not anti-AI, Neville — you know this. Anyone who listens to the show knows I’ve been beating the drum for AI as a tool for communicators and for business in general for a long time.

AI as a thinking partner, a research assistant, a stress-tester for ideas — that’s enormously valuable. But there’s a meaningful difference between using AI to inform a decision and using AI to make the decision. And Brian puts this well: AI is becoming the new executive influencer. The problem is that it hasn’t earned that role, at least not yet.

So let’s talk about what this means for those of us in communication, because the implications are everywhere. Start with employee trust. The implicit deal between an organization and its workforce is that the people at the top got there because they have judgment and experience and pattern recognition that the rest of us don’t have — or at least they’ve been able to employ it really well and get noticed by the people who promote you into those leadership decisions.

That’s the story leadership tells, and it’s the story employees buy into. Now imagine the all-hands where the CEO announces a major restructuring, and somewhere in the Q&A, or worse, on Blind or Reddit a week later, it comes out that the decision was essentially handed to a chatbot. What happens to confidence in leadership? What happens to engagement? What happens to the social contract that says, follow me because I know where we’re going?

You can’t credibly ask people to bring their full selves to work, as they say, while you’re outsourcing your own judgment to a language model. Now extend that to external stakeholders — investors, customers, regulators, the board. They’re paying, and in a lot of cases they’re paying a lot, for executive judgment. If a strategic call goes sideways — and you know that happens — the explanation that the AI suggested it isn’t going to land well.

It’s going to sound like an abdication, because it is an abdication. And from a crisis communication standpoint, “we trusted the algorithm” is one of the worst defenses I can imagine. I don’t expect that anybody’s going to say that, but it doesn’t mean it’s not going to come out. Just ask anyone who’s worked an aviation incident, a financial services failure, or a healthcare AI misfire. Imagine the reaction when either the leader tells people, or they learn through a third party, that the afflicted stakeholder hears, “Well, that’s the decision the AI told me to make.”

And there’s a third implication that I think communicators need to surface inside our organizations: the erosion of dissent. I find this particularly interesting and disturbing.

Confluent found that 65% of leaders say decision-making has become less collaborative since adopting AI. The Harvard Business Review just ran a piece arguing that consensus is dead in the AI era. That may be — but debate isn’t consensus. Debate is the friction that exposes bad assumptions. It’s what didn’t happen at that auto manufacturer — I think it was Volkswagen with their emissions standards. They didn’t have the psychological safety to feel safe in dissenting against the decisions being made. In this case, we’re not even looking forward at the leadership level in some cases. If AI is pushing aside the colleague who would have pushed back, whatever process your organization had for dissent just stops functioning. And when dissent dies, so does the early warning system communicators rely on to spot reputational risks before they get out of control.

So what do we do? A few things. We push for governance — and if you already have a governance model, push to revisit it. Your governance needs clear declarations of which decisions AI informs versus which ones it actually makes. We coach our executives to talk publicly about how they actually use AI, with appropriate humility, before the question gets asked for them.

We build the internal narrative that human accountability is non-negotiable, no matter how good the model gets. And we keep reminding leadership that machine confidence isn’t the same as strategic clarity. Brian’s right: AI is a test of leadership. It’s also, increasingly, a test of communication. Neville?

Neville: Well, just to set my position clear on this, too — I’ve been a drum-beater for AI as a research assistant, as a useful tool, since GPT first came out. The initial kind of hysterical enthusiasm was tempered over time, but I use the tool every single day in what I do for work, or for pleasure for that matter. So it’s something I believe strongly in. But I’ve got this, how could you say, in the back of my mind always — this thought that I don’t accept blindly anything the AI assistant tells me. If I’m researching something, for instance, I’m going to make a recommendation about something, let’s say, or I’m writing a report or even something relatively simple like an article for the blog. If I felt I wanted to say this and it’s telling me that, that’s a simple decision: I’m either going to follow it or not. Typically when that happens, I’ll ask it questions to further that angle. But this is something else, what Brian writes about. And The Register — I’ve read their piece — tempered with a bit of hysteria, it seems. I mean, thi...

FIR #512: The AI Shift in Executive Decision-Making