The jobs of tomorrow, built around data
Who will be in senior management in the next five years? Will senior management be as important in the next five years? With many executives and managers passing the age of 65 in the coming years, many senior management positions will be up for grabs. This raises the question: How can an aspiring executive or manager prepare for the economic and technological changes ahead?
Many promising professionals don’t see opportunities in transformational roles, such as chief transformation officer and chief diversity officer. investigation The survey of 1,000 emerging business leaders aged 25 to 45, published by West Monroe, found that the roles seen as having the greatest 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 is likely to both disappear and gain in importance over the next five years, suggesting the mixed reception the role is receiving.
To qualify the implications of these findings, the survey authors state that they “do not believe these choices mean that the next generation of leaders will stop transforming their organizations or will no longer care about diversity. Rather, it is likely that these roles will be integrated into everyone jobs.
Ultimately, AI, analytics, data, and related initiatives dominate 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 consensus that it is not a fly-by-night technology,” the West Monroe authors say.
Perhaps another lesson from this study is that leadership roles can no longer be limited to specific areas. But every leadership or management role must focus on one goal: an almost obsessive commitment to the customer and the use of tools, technological and otherwise, to deliver a superior customer experience throughout their lifecycle.
Leaders and executives must “think like disruptors” — and that means keeping the customer at the forefront of their minds, at all times, Nathan Furr and Kunal Chakraborty, to write According to Harvard Business Review, 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 elements need to align with a vision of your future customer experience, and you need to map out the small steps needed to make that experience a reality.”
This is done 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 pain points and unmet needs and capturing repeat business with those customers,” they insist.
If everyone is to take on transformational roles in the near future (instead of just one chief transformation officer mentioned in the West Monroe survey mentioned above), they have a clear mandate: to drive growth as a digital business 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 trends in data and making informed predictions. It can help you identify trends in the past and predict possible customer actions in the future.”
These efforts will be aided by an “electronic brain” that creates a dynamic picture of each customer and aggregates all the interactions you have into a 360-degree customer record that updates automatically,” they add. “This electronic brain then sends specific instructions to downstream marketing, sales and service channels.”
“We can expect generative AI to be integrated into every role’s entire workflow to accelerate product creation across all areas of business. This will be limited only by imagination and constrained by technical debt and legacy thinking,” says Sumeet AroraDirector of Development at ThoughtSpot.
“In a world where generative 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 significantly reduced,” adds Arora.
“Now, business users from C-suite to the front line can interact with data, self-serve, and formulate business questions in natural language,” he says. “AI accelerates the speed of action, enabling a broader audience to make data-driven decisions, ultimately leading to a strong data culture.”
Connecting data and technology to deliver superior customer experiences is key to leading organizations into the 2030s.
