Who will be occupying the C-Suite within the next five years? Will the C-suite even be as relevant in the next five years? As many managers and executives push past 65 years of age over the next few years, many leadership roles will be up for grabs. This raises the question: how can an aspiring leader of executive prepare for the economic and technological shifts ahead?
Many up-and-coming professionals don’t see opportunities in transformational type roles, such as chief transformation officer and chief diversity officer, one survey shows. The survey of 1,000 emerging business leaders between the ages of 25 and 45, published by West Monroe, finds roles that are seen as having the most career potential are those influenced by artificial intelligence and advanced analytics — chief AI officer (40%) and chief data officer (11%).
Interestingly, the role of chief digital officer was both likely to disappear and grow in importance over the next five years, suggesting the mixed reception this role is getting.
To qualify the implication’s of these results, the survey’s authors state they “don’t believe these choices mean the next generation of C-suite leaders will stop transforming their organizations — or no longer care about diversity. Rather, it’s more likely these roles will be baked into everyone’s jobs.
The bottom line is artificial, analytics, data, and associated initiatives are dominating organizational mandates, and therefore the composition of leadership roles. “Organizations are still developing and refining their use cases for AI, but there is near-universal agreement that this is not a flash-in-the-pan technology,” the West Monroe authors state.
Perhaps another lesson drawn from this study is leadership roles can no longer be boxed into specific domains. But, there is one focus every leadership or executive role needs to have: an almost obsessive commitment to the customer, and employing the tools, technological and otherwise, to deliver superior lifetime customer experience.
Leaders and executives need to “think like disruptors” — and that means all attention on the customer, at all times, Nathan Furr and Kunal Chakraborty, write in Harvard Business Review. The customer experience “is the North Star that should guide all of your data, AI, and digital initiatives,” Furr and Chakraborty point out. “All of these should align around a vision for your future customer experience, and you need to map out the small steps that are necessary to make that experience a reality.”
This is realized by using data, AI, and digital engineering “to identify which existing customers are most valuable, understand their journeys, pain points and needs in new ways, and then create growth by solving the pain points and unmet needs and capturing repeat business with these customers,” they urge.
If everyone is to assume transformational roles in the near future (instead of a singular chief transformation officer mentioned in the above-mentioned West Monroe survey), they have one clear mandate: promoting growth as a digital enterprise by shifting the customer focus “from transactions to lasting relationships.”
Experiment, test, and leverage AI and advanced analytics to move forward, they also urged. “AI is simply a tool for understanding patterns in data and making educated predictions out of it. It can help you identify patterns from the past and predict possible customer actions in the future.”
These efforts will be facilitated by an “‘electronic brain’ that creates a dynamic picture of each customer and stitches all the interactions you have into one customer 360 record that auto-updates,” they add. “This electronic brain then fires specific instructions to downstream marketing, sales, and service channels.”
“We can expect generative AI will be infused throughout the workflow of every role to accelerate the creation of products across business domains – this will only be limited by imagination and constrained by technical debt and legacy thinking,” says Sumeet Arora, chief development officer for ThoughtSpot.
“In a world where gen AI enables natural language processing and self-service analytics that empower data analysts, business users, and all non-technical users, the digital skills gap is substantially narrowed,” Arora adds.
“Now, business users from C-suite to the frontline can interact with data, self-service and express business questions in natural language,” he states. “AI increases the speed of action, empowering a broader audience to make data-driven decisions, ultimately leading to a strong data culture.”
Connecting data and technology to delivering superior customer experience is the key to leading organizations into the 2030s.
