How to be the Gareth Southgate of business

AI is the new star in the boardroom, but as Southgate knows a singular brilliant player doesn’t win a game, says Simon James

This weekend, English football fans everywhere will be going through the usual mixture of tension and hope. Friday marks the start of the 2024 Euros, and another shot at greatness for England for the 17th time asking.

England delivered a major tournament in the final at the delayed 2020 Euros, powered by the guile of Jack Grealish, Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice.

A lot has changed since 2021, both in business and football. And where new faces like Jude Bellingham present potential to become standouts on the pitch, in the boardroom there’s one player who’s already leaving a lasting impression: AI.

But a singular brilliant player does not win a football game. It takes the management of talent and proper implementation of skills to realise a company’s goals and how AI can work within them. If business leaders want to be like Gareth Southgate and manage successfully they need to understand that AI is a team sport. It needs the right coach, the right line-up, in the right moment to deploy the right tactics.

Firstly, AI needs a sound defence. The gap between what we can do and what we should do with people’s data has never been wider. Defence is about trust, and without the right ethical policies, trust is hard-won and easily destroyed. Some companies are so concerned about ethics, that they are appointing Chief Ethics Officers. A Matthias Sammer to patrol the defence and turn it into attack in the blink of an eye by extolling the virtues of an ethical approach to AI in their earnings calls. Others prefer the no-nonsense approach to defence through AI-enhanced governance and risk processes, like deploying Chiellini and Bonucci in the cyber security team.

Secondly, AI needs to score some actual goals. The way to find the back of the net through AI is to figure out where the value can be generated in a business. Automation is one of the lowest risk applications of AI, replacing all those manual, error-prone processes with the highly optimised metronome of a Xavi-style conductor, linking the disparate parts of the business into a well-oiled machine. Getting more on the front foot, AI is great at giving people superpowers, unlocking a level of productivity that was seemingly impossible. This augmentation of the individual, a human-machine hybrid, like Ronaldo in full flight, is the future of the workforce given the ubiquity of AI in the form of Microsoft Co-Pilot.

Finally, AI is great for creating something out of nothing, hence the name generative, and whilst the focus today is on automation and productivity, the real star of the show is innovation. It’s not about just enhancing processes with AI, but capturing the most value, like a Marco van Basten volley. The process of deploying AI generates proprietary data that would not exist, which in turn creates competitive advantage, and insight into the next generation of AI solutions.

AI will not adopt itself – at least not until Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) comes along. Someone needs to play the role of coach. Businesses are trying to determine whether they need to hire a specialist urbane chief AI officer or promote a tracksuit manager from within the ranks.

Given the nascent stage of the lifecycle of AI technology, it’s perhaps not surprising that very few people have been-there-done-that and can show us their medals. It’s clear that for now, there are more caretaker managers than there are grand appointments. But by the time we get to the next World Cup, the teams scoring the AI goals will be the ones that start investing in their all star line-up now.

Simon James is international lead and group VP of data & AI at Publicis Sapient