The future belongs to technical leaders

The quality of technical judgement will increasingly determine the quality of strategic judgement. And in the next decade, many companies will be limited by the technical judgement of their leaders. Too often, the people making the biggest decisions about software, data, and AI can’t tell whether those systems are any good. They can’t judge the work itself, so they judge the things around it. The polish, the pitch, the promises. This has probably always been true. But AI makes it a much bigger deal. With traditional software, failure is often easier to spot and easier to trace. When something fails, there are usually breadcrumbs to follow. But AI systems are different. They can fail while looking like they are working. They can produce plausible-sounding answers that are wrong. And the first problem is often not tracing why they failed, but noticing that they failed at all. This matters because AI is going to change every business. It will shape how companies sell, serve customers,…