Artificial Leadership: Digital Transformation as a Leadership Task between the Chief Digital Officer and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in all business areas and will have a significant impact on the associated business processes. This will be particularly the case where data is the basis for an improvement as well as an acceleration of the associated workflows, because it is precisely this data that is the input for the algorithms of AI. However, the rapid progress in the performance of these algorithms will also increasingly lead to the output of the algorithms, which are not only being used to support data-driven business processes "for" humans, but also transitioning into data-driven business decisions where the AI will also provide the resulting instructions "to" humans. This will lead to a blending of the operational and strategic levels of business management and will raise many new questions for the related theoretical and practical foundations. This paper aims to highlight this area of tension, discuss the various theoretical influences, and identify the associated research needs. This is exemplified in an area that is directly affected by this field of tension because it is determined by data like no other: the "Digital Transformation" of existing, and the "Digital Innovation" of new, business models and processes as well as the associated corporate management in the form of "Digital Leadership". This is where the human (in the form of a Chief Digital Officer - CDO) and the machine (in the form of Artificial Intelligence - AI) will meet directly. At the end - based on a decision-making theory for a homo economicus vs. a machina economica - there is the first draft of framework for the influence of AI on operational and strategic corporate management, which can be used as a basis for further research and practice-related considerations. In this context, the term "Artificial Leadership", as a further development of "Digital Leadership", is also introduced and defined for scientific research for the first time.