They also create deliberate opportunities for employees to learn and apply AI in their roles. They measure and build acumen in critical areas like coding, data processing and exploration, business analytics, domain and business expertise, ML, visualization and more. They encourage mindsets, behaviors and routines that all serve as a vehicle for experimentation, collaboration and learning from ideation to product development to market launch. They also have an AI talent "roadmap" for hiring diverse AI-related roles, beyond "just" ML engineers--such as behavioral scientists, social scientists, and ethicists.

"When AI goes into the machine learning space, it opens up a range of issues such as biases and privacy," she says. "Boards have to be switched on to this and be able to ask the right questions." According to Williams, a significant proportion of the challenges caused by AI usage within companies comes from the fact that the technology is far from transparent. "Even the people who build it don't really know why it does what it does," she says. If it is successful in understanding AI, developing strategies for it, and integrating it into mainstream business strategy, the payoff is huge." Asked to nominate other technology-related issues occupying the minds board members, panel members pointed to a range including security and the ability to withstand cyber attacks. "Cyber security is really at the top of the list," says David Attenborough, managing director and chief executive at betting company Tabcorp. "This is because any company is under permanent attack from different directions and you need to be protecting your customers, your networks and your employees from those attacks." "The other major issue that keeps me awake at night is the resilience of networks because we have multiple systems supporting a massive retail network and a big digital network.

In the last years, technology has gradually become invisible and digital ubiquity is arising in our daily work and private lives. This is also true for artificial intelligence and its impact for companies to succeed in the digital age. Organizations must foster their digital readiness, which decides about their future business model and which encompasses a range of aspects: it comprises the capability of companies to obtain the benefits which arise from information technology, including their successful transformation into truly digital enterprises and using innovative technologies like artificial intelligence, and people's individual preparedness to embrace and use the new digital technologies for their jobs. Although there is substantial evidence that digital readiness positively influences company outcome in the digital world and employees have to be ready, studies show, that the associated capabilities are only rarely in place. This goes along with a perceived lack of digitally skilled and experienced managers, who do not have enough knowledge about innovation and major digital trends and who are not yet able to fasten reaction speed and to foster an innovation culture of their firms, which is seen as one of the most important innovation barriers by many employees.