CEOs need to embrace a technologist mindset to lead innovation today, the Weber Shandwick's Chris Deri says

• Chris Deri leads Weber Shandwick's corporate-advisory business and is on BI's Workforce Innovation board.
• As an advisor to execs, he finds navigating the most pressing workplace issues is a work in progress.
• This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

Business Insider's "Workforce Innovation" series is gathering perspectives from a wide variety of industry verticals and corporate roles to talk about the drivers of change in companies — particularly artificial intelligence, diversity, equity, and inclusion, worker well-being, and C-suite transformation.

Chris Deri, the president of the Weber Shandwick Collective's corporate-advisory business, advises chief communications officers, chief marketing officers, and other C-suite executives on policy, governance, crisis management, and other management topics.

Research conducted by the firm, Deri said, found CEOs were prioritizing AI, even if they didn't yet know how to get started.

"At the beginning of this year, we asked CEOs, 'What is the action you plan to take this year with regards to AI?'" Deri said. "The most cited action was, 'Secure an AI and technology vendor.'"

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Is AI really occupying the minds of business leaders as much as we think?

For everybody, artificial intelligence is on the radar and a priority. We did research on CEOs and other C-suite executives about the four megatrends that we see impacting business — generative AI, green transition, geopolitics, and misinformation and disinformation.

What was interesting across all of those, and generative AI in particular, was executives expressed limited personal confidence in their own ability to lead their organizations through these transformations. Only 13% of the executives that we spoke to felt they were very capable of leading their own organization through the AI transformation.

There was also a low level of confidence among executives about their own organization's ability to reskill their employees.

There's an incredible amount of hype and speculation in the ecosystem and in the media. But I feel like executives are taking a kind of walk-before-they-run perspective, and I sense a lot of caution.

What leadership qualities are needed to manage the pace of innovation today?

One thing that we think about in terms of technology, of AI in particular — and this is probably true of a lot of things: Executives need to be hands-on, and they need to be taking on the ethos of technologists. They should have caution, but they should adopt some of the principles in the technology world of, "We're going to test and learn, and we're going to fail fast."

This is not going to be a time when you can guarantee results. You can try things out in a way that protects IT systems, but there needs to be a different ethos than many executives have, which is to have already looked around the corner to see what's there. We just all are not in that place. This is an era of complexity, and we really got to embrace the complexity and the open-ended.

How are you advising companies to handle the polarization and politicization of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

DEI and ESG have been hijacked by our politically polarized times. From a communication standpoint, we often advise our clients not to pay attention to the outside noise and to make decisions about these things based on data and what's in the best interest of the enterprise.

We do a lot of analysis to track discussions and the stakeholder groups driving the whole "antiwoke" movement. There are people who subscribe to antiwoke-ism, but we've been able to demonstrate that the size, velocity, and volume of the antiwoke movement online have been conflated, mostly because the movement is just highly engaged. There's not necessarily a corollary, just the sheer numbers.

So what happens is that these online conversations jump to the mainstream media, and they get reported as megamovements. We're using AI-backed analytics to track this.

There are people who have passionate views about DEI on both sides, but for a lot of reasons, we really try to advise our clients not to focus as much on those discussions because they can become an incredible distraction.

Why do return-to-office mandates continue to be a tricky issue for many companies?

Redefining workplace well-being and employee-company contracts post-COVID is still a work in progress. In a hundred years, historians will tell us what this phase was about, but it really feels like we are still figuring it out.

I'm concerned that the hybrid nature of work, and the still-work-in-progress of defining the hybrid nature of work, is hurting us from a learning standpoint and a culture standpoint.

Employees are also confused by a lot of workplace messaging. When you look at the CEOs who get the most attention, whether it's Amazon's or Jamie Dimon, the ones who are really black and white about it are the exceptions. Everybody else is really loosey-goosey about the messaging. A couple of years ago, everybody was petrified that if you enforced any kind of return to office, people would jump.

I also think that the lifestyles of even senior executive decision-makers have changed with hybrid work, and that influences some of the policies that they institute across an entire organization.

What's a concrete example of how you are integrating AI into your workplace?

This is a little bit mundane, but it's had the most impact. We just had training for a few hundred folks in the corporate-advisory business. We were talking about how to use generative AI to do what we call "red teaming," which is basically a way to test ideas, concepts, and messaging with AI personas of different stakeholders, whether it's a senator, an investor, or a customer.

We took them through the technical aspects of how to do that. We talked about proper prompting. But what we needed to get across to them is that this is not to outsource to AI the work that you do as a practitioner.

The AI is to enhance it a little bit, to accelerate things. But this is not to hand over your duties as a thinker and as a member of the knowledge economy — and in our case, as an advisor to your clients who understands the business — to an AI bot. That's a nuanced message about how to embrace what is obviously revolutionary technology.