Soft skills are key to selling responsible AI push

LG screens are everywhere. The South Korea-based company’s displays are an integral part of modern life, appearing in public spaces, around corporate offices, and in the home.

Tom Bingham, LG Electronics’s director of vertical market sales, told IT Brew that developing the technology requires integrating software and hardware—and AI. More reactive screens require complex interactions and data analytics to provide close to real-time responses.

“The biggest thing that people are trying to work on now is making sure that they’re actually able to apply AI into the analytics around the data, ingest that data in real time, and then make decisions,” Bingham said.

Part of a pattern. LG’s not alone in figuring out how to deploy those solutions. AI integration is one of the tech industry’s biggest concerns. At CES, industry leaders like Lenovo CIO Arthur Hu told IT Brew that companies are investing heavily in making sure engineers apply the technology to systems in the right ways.

“At the end of the day, if you are an AI-enabled developer, it doesn’t matter if you’re in IT or in operations technology or in engineering—you’re just working with code and agents to build capabilities,” Hu said.

Take it to the top. AI integration is important, but that doesn’t mean it should be done hastily. Johnny Halife, CTO at Southworks, knows the struggle is real. Pressure from the top to implement a series of AI solutions isn’t always going to align with the reality of building capacity. Testing, layering governance, and research are all essential to the success of integrating the technology into existing systems.

“It’s quite a complicated moment in our industry,” Halife said. “Everybody wants to go AI-centric; most people don’t know what AI is.”

While Halife supports AI deployments, he feels the impact needs to be managed effectively.

“We just need to make sure that we are deploying in the proper way, and that we are not shooting ourselves in the foot in the longer term and exposing ourselves to things that we don’t know about in terms of security attacks,” Halife said. “The future is bright; I think that this is the new industrial revolution of our day, and I’m super bullish about it.”

That’s where the soft skills of working executives come in. Cyware CPO Sachin Jade told IT Brew that a good way to approach the C-suite about slowing the pace of AI integration is to highlight the moving target of expectations. Money and other resources can be adjusted as needed.

“There’s going to be this moving window, which is like, pressure because of shareholder expectations, move to reality, then a little bit to the shareholders, then a bit of the reality, etcetera, and then slowly you start to find that nice equilibrium,” Jade said.

“MVP mindset.” To get executives on board while maintaining a secure and measured development process, it’s important to keep in mind a minimum viable product (MVP) approach where you control the integration piece by piece. By explaining that to the people in charge, you assure them that their interests are being accommodated.

“Having a little bit of that negotiation skills is important, but go with that MVP mindset so that the enterprise executive leadership understands that this is being tested, this is being tried to utilize with the right value set appropriately,” Jade said.