Don’t Let AI Distort Your Decision-Making

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help leaders work faster, but it can also distort decision-making and lead to overconfidence.
If you’re integrating AI tools into forecasting or strategy work, use these safeguards to stay grounded.
Watch out for built-in biases.
AI presents forecasts with impressive detail and confidence and tends to extrapolate from recent trends, which can make you overly optimistic.
To counter this, make the system justify its output: Ask it for a confidence interval and an explanation of how the prediction could be wrong.
Seek peer input. Don’t replace human discus- sion with AI.
Talk with colleagues before finalising forecasts. Peer feedback brings emotional caution, diverse perspec- tives, and healthy scepticism that AI lacks.
Use the AI for fast analysis, then pressure-test its take with your team.
Think critically about every forecast. No matter where advice comes from, ask: What’s this based on? What could be missing?
AI may sound authoritative, but it’s not infallible. Treat it as a starting point, not the final word.
Set clear rules for how your team uses AI. Build in safeguards, such as requiring peer review before acting on AI recommendations and structuring decision-making to include both machine input and human insight.
– Adopted from ‘Research: Executives Who Used Gen AI Made Worse Predictions’, by Patrick Reinmoeller.

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