Innovating AI Leadership Education

This research to practice full paper explores a new educational framework for AI-informed leadership and evaluates its curriculum and pedagogical approach through a novel, tailored, research instrument. Artificial Intelligence continues to rapidly transform many aspects of markets, solutions, and organizational culture across companies, agencies, and institutions in the public and private sectors. Within complex organizations, AI tools, technologies, and applications inform how leaders engage in strategy-making, management, operations, human resources, and professional education. Non-technical managers and executives are increasingly expected to lead teams to implement responsible AI solutions with the promise to improve efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, profitability, and more. AI is rapidly transforming organizational culture, requiring non-technical leaders to develop AI literacy and essential skills to lead teams in implementing responsible AI solutions. In the face of AI-driven change, business leaders need to be AI literate and develop their own essential skills, knowledge, procedures, and perspectives to successfully set vision and strategy to lead teams that can leverage AI to achieve inward-facing and outward-facing business goals. This presents challenges and opportunities to develop new pedagogical approaches and measures to prepare and assess business leaders' AI leadership skills - including understanding human-AI systems in the workplace and their responsible development and ethical use. There are also cultural and organizational behavior challenges in successfully adopting these new capabilities into a global and diverse human-AI workforce at scale. To advance these, we present an innovative hands-on AI leadership curriculum, where participants learn by making and team problem-solving, for United States Air Force (USAF) leaders to learn about AI and its responsible use in human-robot teaming with autonomous robots. We contribute new measures to assess their attitudinal shifts in AI leadership with respect to culture, mindsets, and ethics. We present a pilot study to evaluate our curriculum design and pedagogical approach to foster positive shifts in our AI leadership measures.

I. Introduction

The rapid development of intelligent technologies, services, and tools has ushered in the “era of AI,” with governments, companies, and institutions worldwide embracing this new paradigm. Globally, AI has already transformed many aspects of business markets, solutions, and organizational culture, impacting strategy-making, management, operations, human resources, and professional education. Studies have identified numerous benefits of AI adoption, including business intelligence’ cloud computing, and knowledge management, which have improved organizational performance.