London. For many top managers, artificial intelligence (AI) is primarily a tool to increase efficiency within their group. But can this also improve business management? The head of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, installed an AI assistant on his leadership team in 2018. At the end of Monday’s brainstorming session, Benioff asked the system called “Einstein” what it thought of its managers’ suggestions.
Six years later, the use of artificial intelligence is part of everyday life at the executive level. Global communications consultancy Töpfet CNC, together with the University of Oxford, has now developed an “Executive Impact Score” (EIS) that measures, evaluates and improves the communication of top managers. “We want to respond to the wishes of many CEOs who are used to measuring their performance based on data,” Kuchent-CNC director Dominic Reynolds tells Handelsblatt.
The goal of AI software is to make top managers’ speeches more effective. “A leader who fails to get his message across is likely to fail with his strategy as well,” says Matt Hunt Gardner, who developed and scientifically supported the project as an expert in sociolinguistics at Oxford. The reference point for the EIS is a set of data related to the interventions of 30 managers that Cookiest CNC has selected because they are “particularly good communicators” and therefore serve as a reference point.
This is confirmed by the latest confidence barometer, which the New York-based communications agency Edelman has just presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos. According to a representative survey of 32,000 participants in 28 countries, companies still enjoy the highest trust – or distrust – among all social institutions. This makes day-to-day communication between managers even more important.
Balance between information and emotion
“People are incredibly good at recognizing small differences in the way others speak,” says Gardner. “However, they are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to assessing their own language.” The Executive Impact Score helps with this self-assessment by providing managers with a snapshot of their language trends and showing how to improve.
It’s not about getting rid of bad grammar or regional accents. What is most important is the pace of the speech and the right balance between information and emotions, depending on the recipient of the speech and the medium used.