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Moira Forbes interviews Angela Ahrendts at the Fashion Tech Forum

Leading In The Age Of AI: Angela Ahrendts On How Creativity Will Set Future Business Leaders Apart

Angela Ahrendts and Moira Forbes in conversation at the Fashion Tech Forum at Nasdaq MarketSite in N... [+] Madison Voelkel/BFA.com
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“Leaders will look back on 2023 as one of the most pivotal years in human history,” says Angela Ahrendts, former SVP of Apple Retail and former CEO of Burberry, commenting on the AI-driven technological revolution and its transformational effect on the business landscape. “The acceleration and the pace of change and what AI will spawn isn’t dissimilar to everything that came from the iPhone,” added Ahrendts during our conversation at the recent Fashion Tech Forum in New York City. “We can't begin to fathom all the innovations that will come from this.”

In an age defined by intense disruption and rapid change, Ahrendts posits that the essence of effective leadership is undergoing a radical shift, with AI supplanting many of the "hard" skills that organizations typically prioritize within the executive ranks. She believes that creatives now have a distinct competitive advantage, because they bring qualitative attributes, such as passion, intuition, and empathy, things machines can’t replace. “We are going to be leaning on the creatives to look ahead and to run things,” she predicts. “We need to amplify human attributes in an artificial world.”

Businesses that embrace this new paradigm of leadership are best positioned to thrive in an AI era, according to Ahrendts. She stresses the importance of harnessing human characteristics in an artificial world, skills that can’t be replicated by algorithms. "We [humans] need to be an incredible complement to AI and, with it, bring in new minds and new ways of thinking," says Ahrendts. Likewise, businesses must understand the opportunity technology gives them to unleash a new wave of creativity and innovation – and must deploy the resources to take advantage of that. "As leaders, we have to invest in our own companies. We must invest just as much into the human component of our businesses as we put into technology, so we can evolve and unlock our ways of thinking, because we're behind."

For Ahrendts, the future of business lies in the synergy of human creativity and AI-powered technology. Those who can strike the right balance between the two will lead and define this next era of innovation. “You’d better stay curious and be a lifelong learner. The more you read, the more you're ‘inputting’ into this database, so your instincts are constantly being empowered. Then you can connect the dots,” says Ahrendts. “It’s no different than a large language model in AI.”