UNLEASH America 2024: AI and Courageous Leadership in Focus
Find out why courageous leadership is today’s most critical requirement in HR, business, and politics!
Marc Coleman, CEO of UNLEASH, talks about the impact of AI at UNLEASH America 2024. He discusses how AI and strong leadership are crucial in adapting to the changing workplace and transforming various industries such as recruitment, training, marketing, medicine, farming, and manufacturing. This leads to increased innovation and productivity.
We live in a time of change, and many more changes will be ahead. In the work and human resources (HR) world, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and automation are driving and will continue to drive massive workplace transformations, including new jobs, increased efficiency, and agility. Courageous leaders must break the mold and carve a path for their organizations to succeed in an ever-evolving market.
At UNLEASH America 2024, the international festival of HR held May 7-9 in Las Vegas, AI and courageous leadership were two of the main themes discussed across stages, panels, and roundtables, among other leading future-of-work trends. Not surprisingly, AI was even more prominent at UNLEASH America 2024 than last year, following the massive attention and investments devoted to AI in 2023.
The Adoption of AI Is Changing Most Industries
UNLEASH America 2024 sessions and exhibitors illustrated that AI is making various waves across the HR industry. For example, AI is helping in recruiting to find ideal potential candidates by evaluating resumes and LinkedIn profiles; AI-based training and reskilling systems are helping companies and employees stay current with skills while continuing their mutual investments and relationships; and AI measures employee engagement and experience to help ensure employees are content and feel appropriately challenged with engaging work.
In addition to its impact on HR, AI is changing work in almost all industries. Let’s look at a few examples:
- Marketing: AI provides rapid website and newsletter creation with AI-generated designs, images, and text based on simple prompts; automated search engine optimization (SEO); automatic personalization based on demographics, purchase history, and page views; and analytics to track campaign performance. With access to such tools at low cost, AI is especially helping small and midsize businesses (SMBs) better compete with large organizations.
- Medicine: AI provides initial interpretations of X-ray, CT scan, and MRI images, helps diagnose illnesses, and suggests treatments based on anonymized results in clinical registry databases; it also assists clinical staff with data entry so they can spend more time with patients.
- Farming: AI, robotics, and automation help determine irrigation and fertilization schedules and automatically plant, fertilize, irrigate, apply pesticides, and harvest crops to make farms more productive.
- Manufacturing: AI helps direct and control production and factory automation while predicting maintenance requirements to keep automated machines and robots at peak performance. This assists manufacturers in improving and scaling their production.
- Information technology: AI helps automatically integrate disparate systems and analyze network activity for fraud and anomaly detection, allowing engineers to focus more on business initiatives such as digital transformation and cybersecurity management.
In most businesses in any industry, AI improves productivity and decision-making by drafting correspondence and aggregating and providing information, analytics, and recommendations for virtually every facet of a company.
See More: How AI Is Revolutionizing Software Adoption
AI Session Highlights at Unleash America 2024
During their product spotlight sessions, Mark Brandau, chief marketing officer at XpertHR, and John Schneider, chief marketing officer at Betterworks, dove into the effects of AI on the talent economy and performance management processes, respectively. Leading HR practitioners are leaning into trusted people data to stay up to speed on a space that continues to bring new capabilities for efficiency and productivity at the tip of their fingers.
Other AI sessions that were particularly insightful were those of Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, on the intersection of AI and HR, precisely its effect on leadership, innovation, and trust. Ethan Mollick, associate professor of The Wharton School, in his keynote on the boundless opportunities and incredible possibilities of AI and how we can thoughtfully and consciously embrace it to propel innovation and shape our future.
Navigating Complexity with Courageous Leadership
We are in a brave new world of political, technological, and environmental disruption, but at UNLEASH America 2024, we learned that we can navigate it and steer toward positive outcomes with one of the most critical requirements in HR, business, and politics today: courageous leadership.
Courageous leadership is the ability to confront and interpret events and trends and chart a course for humanely moving forward amid change and opportunity. Examples include fighting and toppling fascist regimes in World War II, the current resistance of Ukraine and Alexei Navalny’s organizations against Russia, and many generally peaceful protests and successful movements toward civil rights, women’s suffrage, freedom of speech and religion, political independence and environmental protection.
Although generally less dramatic and dangerous than some of the above mentioned examples, in the business world, we see examples of courageous leadership toward sustainability, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging every day. DEIB, and integrating technology developments and initiatives with employees and HR through upskilling and reskilling; this was a significant theme at UNLEASH America 2024.
Courageous leadership is authentically leading and serving with head and heart, as brilliantly portrayed by Dr. Kirstin Ferguson in her book Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership. Kristin, a keynote speaker at the festival, dove into the importance of individual modern leadership, spotlighting recent research that illustrates the differences (and synergies) between head-based skills and heart-based qualities.
Courageous leadership also changes career management for oneself and others, such as transitioning from sports icon to business icon and philanthropist, helping those in underserved communities, exemplified by Earvin “Magic” Johnson. This NBA legend and chairman and CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises wrapped up UNLEASH America in a satisfying way as a main-stage speaker on the topic of lessons in leadership mastery. Amidst unprecedented volatility in recent years, Magic Johnson is the epitome of grace and success from courtside to boardroom, illustrating how courage and tenacity are vital to leading teams and driving results in any industry.
Shaping a Better Future Through Human-tech Integration
The call for courageous leadership now involves integrating people with AI and all the disruptive technologies and HR issues cited above and charting a path forward that should immensely benefit humanity in areas including; work-life balance, DEIB, breakthroughs in medicine, food supply, operations in all industries, and legislation to curb the dark side of AI, such as deep fakes, biases, and misinformation in elections.
As shown at UNLEASH America 2024, courageous leadership in business, technology, and politics will shape the present and future of work and the global economic and business climate by leading with head and heart and channeling and integrating the complementary strengths of humans and technology.
We’ve already proven many times that we have the skills and the ingenuity to navigate change and disruption; now, let us unleash those talents with courageous leadership to create brilliant outcomes for our future. Ultimately, courageous leadership is about creating a better world for the next generations.
Did you happen to participate in the UNLEASH AMERICA 2024 event? What insights did you gather? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstock
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