Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo who was one of the highest-ranking women in the business world, spends her days studying up on AI. She sits on the boards of Amazon, Honeywell, and Philips, and she views that continuing study as a responsibility.
“Many board directors don’t like to be re-educated. But if they don’t re-educate themselves, how do they know if the company is doing right by shareholders?” she told me recently.
Nooyi is taking everything she’s learning and putting it into another part-time role as an instructor for MasterClass Executive, a program that MasterClass launched with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and OpenAI. She’s teaching “leadership in the world of AI transformation.” Even though she’s not as close to the forefront of AI as active executives, she’s steered companies through transformations before.
“Everybody has to go back to being a student,” she argues. “It’s not that you can just say it doesn’t affect me.”
Nooyi’s board seats have given her her own continuing education. At Amazon, she’s observed how the tech giant is applying AI to AWS, to video, to entertainment, music, games, and devices—plus AI watchdog teams looking for how the technology can mislead. At Philips, she’s seeing the impact of AI on imaging and medicine. At Honeywell, she’s watching industrial automation. “I’m like a kid in a candy store,” she says. “I’m learning so much.”
And boards are just one place where that continuing education is important. Nooyi also has suggestions for how employees, CEOs, and professors should be retooling their work and teaching for AI. Business schools should update the cases they are using to teach students. Companies should update their interview frameworks; rather than put a case in front of a junior candidate, Nooyi would have them demonstrate the questions they would ask AI to figure out an answer, and evaluate whether they take the answer at face value or continue to push and think critically.
If Nooyi were running a company today, she would study the vertical use cases for AI and train the top two of three levels of leadership. She would evaluate AI deployment in every department, from HR to financial services. She would set up three AI pilots, one to lower costs, one to drive top-line, and a third to do both.
The “single-biggest challenge” would be her entry-level workforce. PepsiCo is known as a leadership training ground, so Nooyi has a wealth of experience thinking about developing future leaders. “If you don’t have entry-level people who grow up to be middle managers, how are you going to get that judgment?” she asks. She’d look for young people who “can query AI every which way.” She’d hope they are unafraid to ask questions—compared to middle managers who might be more concerned for their jobs.
For anyone who’s not keeping up with these changes—especially at the board level—Nooyi has a message. “What are they going to contribute?” she asks. “The day I feel I’m not contributing as a board member, I’ll be the first person to step out.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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