Angela Ahrendts on Embracing AI and the Creative Community
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NEW YORK — Change is inevitable and embracing the younger generation that is comfortable with the latest technology is the key to guiding businesses to future success.
That was the message from Angela Ahrendts, chair of Save the Children International and the former chief executive officer of Burberry and senior vice president of Apple Retail.
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In a conversation with Moira Forbes, executive vice president of Forbes and president and publisher of ForbesWomen at the Fashion Tech Forum, Ahrendts said she believes 2023 will be a transformative year. She likened it to 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Apple, a device that changed the world.
Today, it’s AI and chatbots that will transform society, she believes. “You have to pivot, you have to put a different lens on everything you do,” she said. “I believe that the next five to 10 years, we’ll look back and talk about 2023 exactly like we talked about ’07. We have to be open, we have to be flexible, because the innovations are going to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
As a result, leaders will have to evolve and develop new skill sets. “Maybe leadership is no longer about top down. Maybe it’s about bottom up,” she said. “Leaders think they have to have the answers, but maybe with the answers already in open AI, it’s not about the answer, it’s about asking the right questions. These are the types of things that are just going to be flipped upside down.”
In this new world, she said, it’s the creatives that “need to have a seat at the table.” Some innovative companies are naming creatives as their CEOs or, at the very least, to sit alongside the CEO.
“I think that’s going to be imperative in every institution,” she said, “because in a world of AI, it is the creatives who connect dots, who look around corners, who have the passion, the instincts, the empathy and most important, the courage to stand up for what they believe. So I think reordering and elevating is a critical component of leadership going forward.”
Ahrendts said she’s not afraid of the rise of AI because it’s been around for more than two decades and is just now finding its way into the mainstream. “There will be bad things that happen with AI, just like there’s a dark web. But luckily, 80 percent of people don’t go to the dark web. We live on the good web, and so the same thing will happen here.”
She also realizes that there are gifts that humans possess that can never be replicated by a computer program, no matter how sophisticated.
“It’s our God-given attributes,” she said. “It is our instinct, our empathy, our creative thinking and solving, our passion. AI doesn’t feel. It’ll take the data that’s there, but it doesn’t have the gifts that we have. So we need to be an incredible complement to it and bring in the new minds and the new way of thinking.”
She said that the winners will be able to “amplify” our human attributes “in an artificial world.”
Ahrendts said that during her time at Burberry, the company created an Innovation Council consisting of a group of recent college graduates who brainstormed to come up with innovative ideas. Ditto for Apple, which used its 55,000 store employees to “crowdsource” ideas to keep the company relevant.
“Leadership has to evolve,” she said. “And you, as a leader, has to evolve too. The next generation you’re bringing in is already smarter than all the older people you have. You need to use them, you need to unlock the digital natives, unlock the creatives.”
And embrace the future so you’re not left behind, she added. “You’ve got to have an AI lens. If you don’t, you’re going to fall further and further behind. There are thousands of start-ups already in the [Silicon] Valley doing apps and unique things that are all pivoting off of AI. And it’s going to be so exponential that if you don’t start now, you will get so behind in the race.”
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