Do Managers Actually Understand AI? (I’m Not So Sure.) | AI Reality Check

Do you ever get that sense when you're hearing business executives talk about AI that they seem to be living in a completely different world than the rest of us? I mean, I get that feeling a lot. I wanna give you a recent example. Last week, I came across an article from the New York Times business sector that interviewed multiple executives from the German software company SAP, as well as several European business and economics analyst. And what struck me was how confident everyone was that AI had already started massively disrupting the economy and would continue to do so at an accelerating rate in the near future. Here, let me load the article on the screen here. Look. The title was, can you embrace AI without layoffs? This company says it's trying. And look at the subhead here. The German software giant SAP says it's betting that employees can reinvent jobs instead of eliminating them. Experts are divided on whether it will work. Alright. So let's think about that wording for a moment. That article, this interview with the SAP executives takes for granted. Right? The people they talk to take for granted that AI, if left unchecked, is poised to eliminate large number of jobs. So the only question is whether or not there is something we can come up with to stop that by having maybe new jobs to replace all those that we are for sure about to lose. Now these are incredibly bold claims, and yet they're made so confidently and so casually when you hear business executives talk. And to me, this raises some key questions such as, why is the business community so confident that AI will definitely eliminate lots of existing jobs? What is it that executives and SAP are seeing about their own employees and their clients that makes them think that these massive changes are imminent? And most importantly, are they right? Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for an AI reality check episode of this podcast, which is the perfect opportunity to go seeking some measured answers. Alright. So here's my plan. I'm gonna dive deeper into this article and try to better understand what the business community over there in Europe actually believes about AI, and then I'll step back and give you my take. I wanna give a trigger warning here. If you're an executive at one of these companies or a business analyst, you might not like the conclusions I end up reaching. Alright. Anyways, let's dive in. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. Alright. So I wanna return to the article here, and read another quote from it that I I think sets the stage for how executives at SAP are thinking about AI and its impact. So I'll put this on the screen here and read it. Its leaders concede that AI is eliminating the need for …