Becoming a conductor in the age of AI
Is there any point in learning new skills with AI coming? It’s more important than ever. Here’s why.
To be a conductor of a symphony orchestra you don’t need to be able to play all the instruments, but you do need to understand how they all work.
I believe the same will be true in the future with AI, with a key skill being understanding and knowing how to conduct all the facets of a business and associated AI tools.
While understanding all the dimensions of a company has been an important skill for CEOs for many years, in the future companies will be much smaller, and many more people will be empowered to run or co-run companies.
Thus, we’ll need more mini-CEOs, and a more generalist or conductor skillset will be much more valuable. These conductors will need a strong working knowledge of each of the core dimensions of a company, but not necessarily super deep in all of them, AI will handle a lot of the deeper work.
These company dimensions will be the same as they are today, and include:
- Strategy & Vision
- Product Design & Development
- Sales & Marketing
- Operations & Support
- Finance & Admin
While I’ve spent most of my career in marketing and design, over the last 18 months I've been learning new skills and refining existing skills so that I can effectively conduct the company of the future. This includes, for example, becoming proficient at front-end development (ex: HTML, CSS, JS) — not to the point of needing to code from scratch, but so that I can understand most of it and wield the tools.
I’m personally very excited about what’s to come as I believe the opportunities will be immense if we can quickly adapt to some new skills and structures. Sadly this will come with job loss as well, but I think even more opportunities will arise if willing to pivot and retrain.
How do you rank yourself on all of the above dimensions of a business? Are there areas you could augment so you can effectively conduct in the future of AI businesses?
