Artificial Intelligence Needs Leadership with Bryant Lee Jones (USA)

Handing decisions to AI sounds efficient until you ask a basic question: who carries the consequences when the model is wrong? We sit down with Sir Bryant Lee Jones, a Silicon Valley CIO who has guided organisations through four decades of technology upheaval, to make the case that AI’s biggest challenge is not the algorithms. It is leadership, governance, and the quality of executive judgement.

We dig into what AI is and what it is not, why the “halo effect” keeps convincing smart people that new systems must be infallible, and how machine learning can fail when it has nothing solid to learn from. We also get honest about bias, feedback loops, and the uncomfortable reality of AI hallucinations: answers that sound credible yet collapse under scrutiny. If you work in business, public sector, or any role touching enterprise AI strategy, responsible AI, or digital transformation, this is the part that matters most.

From there we zoom out to the operating model. Sir B. argues that AI introduces a fourth enterprise architecture: a cognitive architecture that senses, reasons, recommends, learns, and coordinates across the organisation. That shift changes what leaders do day to day, moving from routine decisions towards designing decision systems that are accountable, auditable, and safe, especially as AI moves from isolated tools into autonomous, embedded systems.

If you care about AI governance, executive decision making, cybersecurity risk, and building trust in AI without surrendering control, press play. Subscribe, share this with a leader who needs to hear it, and leave a review with your biggest question about governing intelligence.

Music, lyrics, guitar and singing by Dr Ariel Rosita King

Teach me to live one day at a time
with courage love and a sense of pride.
Giving me the ability to love and accept myself
so I can go and give it to someone else.
Teach me to live one day at a time.....

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Dr Ariel R King 0:42

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Business of Life with Dr. King. Today we have a very special guest, Sir B. Lee Jones. Welcome, sir.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Welcome. Glad to be here. I'm honored.

Dr Ariel R King 0:54

Thank you. Could you please introduce yourself to our audience and our topic for today?

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Okay. Well, I've been a Silicon Valley CIO for a number of years, and actually, my career has spanned nearly every major technology transformation of the past 40 years. I've watched organizations adapt to personal computing, the internet, enterprise software, cloud computing, mobile technology, cybersecurity, digital transformation. And now a lot of the discussion is around AI and how AI is going to change things. So when I looked at what was happening around AI, I realized that most of the conversation was about the technology. Having spent my career helping organizations navigate major technology transitions, that isn't that isn't complete. Okay, technology's never been the hard part. Leadership has always been the hard part. AI raises AI raises the stakes. That realization led me to start asking a different set of questions, and actually that's how I started writing a series of articles for LinkedIn called Structured Intelligence. Okay. Over the past year, I've been exploring that idea in the Structured Intelligence series. Okay, my conclusion is pretty straightforward. The biggest challenge for AI is not the technology itself, it's leadership. As AI becomes embedded in the operating fabric of the enterprise, governance, judgment, accountability, and executive decision making become the defining competitive advantages. That's the conversation I want to have today.

Dr Ariel R King 2:51

I'm looking forward to that. So let's get started. I'm going to let you do the introduction and we'll learn as much as I can.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

All right. Okay.

Dr Ariel R King 3:00

Um well as as do we start with leadership or do we start with AI? And for people that, you know, this is you've been in it for so long, and you've actually been a part of the history of it. So for people like myself who don't know a lot about it, you know, we we've we've done our little bit and our little share. How would you like to introduce this subject to to people like me who are not so well versed in this?

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Okay. Well, well, well, let's let's let's start about a little bit about what AI and about is and what AI isn't. You know technology has changed the way executives you the tools they use and how they use them. Artificial intelligence is the first intelligence that uh moves through the organization. Once that happens, leadership's diminished. It and it becomes even

What AI Is And Is Not

SPEAKER_01 4:02

more important. The challenge isn't low is no longer simply managing technology, it's governing intelligence. Artificial intelligence isn't the story. The the evolution of executive leadership is. I don't claim to have all the answers. What I've been trying to do is ask the right questions. You know, AI is the latest technology with uh that halo effect. You know, I've been through all the major technologies, and my expertise is really integration. You know, I've always been responsible for getting us from the old technology to the new technology, but most importantly, defining and actually implementing how it's used within the organization. You know, it's not just a matter of you throw a technology over the wall and you know, everything works. You know, it it's fundamental to how organizations run. You know, we've been promised, you know, this is the last great technology. You know, I've been doing this, I wrote my first computer program when I was in junior high in 1965. Wow. Okay. That was a reference. That was about seven years after the first work on artificial intelligence was published in 1958. So it and I have been both around for a long time, feeling each other up. You know, there there have been times, you know, with this halo effect. At one time, the head of IBM said that there'll never be a need in the world for more than five computers.

Dr Ariel R King 5:52

Believe it or not.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

The head the head of Digital Equipment Corporation once said, no, there's no need for anybody to have a computer at home. And even when we got into the personal computers and everything, Steve Jobs famously said that computers will never have to have more than 640k of memory.

Dr Ariel R King 6:17

I had one of those. I remember that too.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

So, you know, you know, so that's that's part of the halo effect. You know, one of the great misconceptions, I think, about artificial intelligence is many soon many people assume that artificial intelligence becomes more capable. And as it becomes more capable, that leadership becomes less important. Okay. Well, I I fundly fundamentally disagree with that. I believe the opposite. The more capable systems become, the more executive governance, the more important, more critical uh

The Halo Effect And Tech Myths

SPEAKER_01 7:05

executive governance becomes. Leadership's not disappearing, leadership is evolving. Tomorrow's executives will spend less time making routine operational decisions and far more time designing the governance of architectures that determine how decisions are made across the enterprise.

Dr Ariel R King 7:27

You know, that's that's the that's the that's what most people are not talking about that you've been writing about. Can you can we talk more about leadership and governance of AI and the reasons why you think it's necessary and and how do we go about that? Okay, sure.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Well, you know, there is there's this conception, of course, that artificial intelligence will be able to do everything. You know, it'll be able to make all the decisions and everything. And, you know, that's that's fundamentally flawed. You know, AI at this point still has lots of problems. You know, there are things that AI can't do. Again, back to one of my LinkedIn articles, I wrote an article because I've been approached a number of times, you know, with people saying, well, AI can do anything. So I actually wrote an article about something that AI couldn't do. There's a famous historical document called the Voynich Manuscript. That's this completely unintelligible book in unintelligible language with diagrams and everything. And a lot of people had thought, well, you

Limits Of AI And The Bias Problem

SPEAKER_01 8:48

know, artificial intelligence can be able to, you know, translate that for us. Well, guess what? Artificial intelligence needs a Rosetta Stone. You know, there has there has to be a language model because artificial intelligence is really about machine learning. Artificial intelligence gets its information, gets its decision-making process based on known data, known information. Well, there's no book about this language that the Voynage manuscript was in. So there's nothing for it to compare to.

unknown 9:33

You know.

Dr Ariel R King 9:58

That that's interesting to me.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Well, keep in mind, you know, you know, what I said about machine learning, artificial intelligence uses its sources for its reference. Now, if the references it gets, think of think about it. You have a friend who only watches one or two different TV channels, who only reads one or two different newspapers, they're gonna have a distinct a distinct bias in their opinions on a lot of things. And AI is no different. If all the information it has is biased toward a certain political or technical stent, then you're you know, you're putting all your eggs in one basket. That that's going to be the right decision.

Dr Ariel R King 10:55

So what you put in, pardon me, what you put in is actually what you get out. So yeah, it's important to figure out what you put in and why you put it in in order to get information.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Well, and and it's not what you put in, it's what others put in. You know, it's how the algorithms themselves use the information that's available. If you know, if your friend doesn't talk to other people who have a different perspective, he's never gonna have, you know, uh the that thought process. And AI is can be the same way. You know, the risk is a lot of people are so determined that you know, this halo around artificial intelligence is that it's gonna be able to solve all our problems. And we can let it make the decisions. Well, that's scary. Okay.

Dr Ariel R King 11:49

That's very scary, actually.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Okay. Now I'm I'm besides being a technologist, I'm a sci-fi freak. You know, I but I've I've read sci-fi books and saw movies, you know, from my whole life. But a lot of them have a lot of good lessons for us to learn. And again, I've written a couple articles, you know, relating to that on LinkedIn, you know, talking about a couple situations. You know, one of my favorites, an AI movie that

Sci Fi Warnings About Delegating Control

SPEAKER_01 12:26

you might have a hard time finding, is called Colossus, the Forbin Project. In that movie, the Americans build a supercomputer to take over all of the defense of the United States. They give it the power to control the defense missiles and the offensive missiles for the whole United States without any without any inside outside intervention, without any.

Dr Ariel R King 12:58

Pardon me, you mean that the it makes decisions?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

It makes decisions, yes, instead of giving information to help executives make a better decision. Well, the interesting thing was the American computer in searching around found out that there was a Russian computer that was just the same. Right. And as you might imagine, the two computers then started comparing notes.

Dr Ariel R King 13:31

I love it.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

And then they decided that pretty much people weren't, you know, equipped to handle, you know, those kind of responsibilities. It's the the one that everybody will think about is in 2001 a space odyssey, when the astronaut is coming back to the spaceship, and he tells Hal, the computer, the AI computer, let me in, Hal. And Hal's response is, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. Because Hal has determined that humans now are detrimental to the mission.

Dr Ariel R King 14:18

So his isn't that isn't that a lot of people's fear that not only do we not know enough about AI, but AI actually learns from itself. And as a result of some, I don't know about this, but learning from itself that it will start to come up with ideas that have not necessarily been ones that are positive for us. I mean fear for people.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

Well, and it's back to again my you know, my machine learning premise. It becomes self-perpetuating. If it's generated intelligence based on, you know, a biased set of information, it's gonna continue to reinforce that. And if more people use AI and publish or do things based on those kind of biased results, it's gonna reinforce itself. It's self-perpetuating, it's gonna get you know even worse.

Dr Ariel R King 15:19

So, what what do we do? How do we start to address this issue? It seems like it's uh it seems that we're on a precipice, a really important time in history to figure out what we're doing and why we're doing it and how to do it.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

Well, every every major technology wave, you know, and I've described it, they've changed the tools that executive use. Artificial intelligence is the first technology that changes how intelligence moves to the organization. Once that happens, leadership isn't diminished. Actually, leadership should be more important. The challenge isn't uh just managing technology, it's governing intelligence. Artificial intelligence is not the story. That's why I believe that the evolution of executive leadership is. You know, I don't claim to know the answers, but I think we need to ask the right questions.

Dr Ariel R King 16:15

I agree. I I really like that. Did you say international governance? What would international governance look like and who would be a part of that?

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Well, it's it's really creating a structure because now for decades, organizations have been built around three basic architectures, around business architecture, information architecture, and technology architecture. I'm I'm a believer that artificial intelligence introduces

The Fourth Architecture Called Cognitive

SPEAKER_01 16:52

the fourth technology, fourth architecture, not another application architecture, not another technology stack. It adds a cognitive architecture, one that continuously senses, reasons, recommends, learns, coordinates across the enterprise. The organizations that recognize that transition are going to be the ones who are going to have a competitive advantage in the future. You know, you organizations can't will not increasingly won't be defined by the systems they own.

Dr Ariel R King 17:32

Well, see, that's interesting. That that in itself is a change, isn't it? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

Well, that's because the competitive the competitive architectures they build, because in the age of artificial intelligence, competitive advantage won't be no longer no longer belong to the organization with the most data. It will belong to the organization that learns faster, reasons better, and institutionalizes superior judgment.

Dr Ariel R King 18:03

That's quite interesting. But the average person like myself that doesn't usually use AI sometimes, but it hasn't been a major part of my life yet. Can you explain maybe talk about why it's important for us to uh start focusing on leadership within AI and what would that look like? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Well, you know, we need to get to the point where the the intent of all the previous technologies, you know, to make systems more capable, to make them more efficient, to help us make better decisions, you know, AI can do that. You know, I use AI, but for very specific things, and it works very well for that. But we need to make sure that there's, you know, we have that there's a transition that doesn't happen where it makes the decisions. We still have to we still have to have a leadership, you know, uh an executive decision process that evaluates all that data. And it can be better data and more data, but they need to do that to determine how the organization moves forward.

Dr Ariel R King 19:26

Can I ask, I mean, I have read about there are times when AI has generated purposely false data. Yes. And AI, and it remember it's artificial intelligence, but somehow artificial intelligence, I won't say wants to see if you catch it, but somehow it's well, will you accept this? And I'm wondering how do we deal with that kind of issue? Because it's almost like uh a science fiction. It's not just everything we put in in some ways is coming out and it's evaluating, but somehow it's taking everything that we've put in and

Hallucinations And Why Verification Matters

Dr Ariel R King 20:03

able to come up with something different, almost as a a new DNA code, for example. Yeah. So can you talk more about that and what can we do about that?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Okay, well, you know, one of the one of the remaining weaknesses with AI is it still makes mistakes. And most of the you know, AI platforms will even, you know, give you little notices about, you know, make sure you check the data, you know, as a disclaimer. It also, they're also susceptible to having hallucinations.

Dr Ariel R King 20:43

Exactly. What is that? How can AI, how can artificial intelligence have hallucinations? Isn't that something that just we humans have?

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Well, artificial intelligence, human intelligence, it's getting it, it's deriving its information from you know all that machine learning. And sometimes I think it gets confused or it imagines things. And that's that's kind of scary.

Dr Ariel R King 21:13

But that also tells us that AI has the ability to create. So we're not just talking about information that's been put in and information that's being evaluated and put together and then somehow sent back out, but we're also talking about something that's very different than information being put in. Um the ability to to confuse on purpose, the the ability to quote unquote hallucinate, these sound more like human traits. So is there something that I'm not understanding about artificial intelligence that somehow artificial intelligence is starting to pick up something that's a little bit more human?

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Well, remember, all of its input is human. You know, all of that is from the machine learning, all of its, you know, what it's learned. And a lot of that, a lot of that can be confusing. You know, the algorithms still are not sophisticated enough to, you know, identify that. And also, you know, I think there's a big, you know, the big risk is people believing that everything AI says is correct. Everything everything that everything it says is right, and you you know go away from it, and you know, you don't you don't evaluate. Well. Well, you know, what would happen if AI came up with a cure for cancer? Wouldn't there have to be clinical trials to evaluate whether it really was a cure for cancer? Well, that's not much different to it making a decision about you're doing an acquisition of another company for your company. You know, you still need that leadership part in there to do the evaluation. You know, medical people aren't gonna, you know, out of hand put in cancer cure without doing, you know, very extensive clinical evaluations and everything. You know, they they you know, they they shouldn't and shouldn't trust, you know, an AI conclusion any more than somebody's previous clinical work in a lab.

Dr Ariel R King 23:41

You know, and there's that's that's also a very good point. But can I ask you, with such little, I won't say control, but even even rules, international rules of how we use AI, when we use AI, what information gets put into AI, and then also a better understanding of this quote-unquote hallucinations or giving answers that sound probable, but is not correct. So I'm one I'm wondering how how are we as people and as those who actually start to help with regulating, I don't know what to call it, but somehow making sure that you know it could be used properly. What's the next step for that, especially someone like you who's been doing one artificial intelligence one way or another for 60 plus years? What do you think our next steps are to actually make it useful for us?

SPEAKER_01 24:40

I think as AI moves forward, you know, beyond being isolated tools and it becomes more embedded in the enterprise, we're no longer going to be automating individual tasks. Okay, we're gonna be creating distributed systems capable of observing, recommending, coordinating, negotiating, and sometimes maybe acting very autonomously. Okay, the question that executive leadership of is is

Autonomy Risks From Tools To Weapons

SPEAKER_01 25:17

there a point that AI is intelligence or whether it has to resolve remain under executive control? Okay.

Dr Ariel R King 25:27

If intelligence, but isn't pardon me, isn't that a strange question in itself to ask whether or not something that is something that we put in can actually be autonomous when actually artificial intelligence has been at least proposed to be something that we use and somehow we're able to uh control? Isn't that kind of a strange question now, whether or not it can do things by itself automatically without that human input, that human intelligence input?

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Okay, well, that's that's why you need to have the governance part of artificial intelligence so that it can make the suggestion but not make the decision and and not execute the decision, you know, because there are you know there are different forms of AI. Remember, there's also a physical AI component where it's embedded into machinery and everything. It could be embedded into the firing system of a ballistic missile.

Dr Ariel R King 26:35

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Right. And how do you, if AI decides it needs to fire the missile, what's the control mechanism for making sure that it doesn't make that decision itself? Exactly. That was the whole thing in the the Forbin project. Oh, another one of my favorite movies and Forbidden Planets. The astronauts from Earth come across a scientist and his daughter on this planet, where the original inhabitants of this planet had developed uh technologies two million years before ours. They built this huge machine that was 20 miles by 20 miles by 20 miles deep, that powered what they wanted to do. And it could instantly, because it had this almost infinite amount of power, generate things at will. If you wanted, you know, much like the replicators in Star Trek, if you wanted some Earl Grey hot, it could generate that for you. But you know what happened to those aliens?

Dr Ariel R King 27:55

What happened?

SPEAKER_01 27:56

The monsters from the id, because they had eliminated all the processes, you don't have to be at a keyboard or a screen or anything. Your your thoughts control how this machine does what it does. Well, you also have an unconscious mind. And a lot of deep, dark things happen in your unconscious mind. You know, there's a lot of hate and destruction and everything that may happen in your unconscious mind. And the machine for these particular aliens, the krill, had access to your mind and your unconscious mind, and they wiped and it they wiped out themselves. My goodness.

Dr Ariel R King 28:54

My apology for interrupting. We just have two more minutes. Is there some ideas that you'd like to leave our audience with about artificial intelligence and leadership?

SPEAKER_01 29:05

Uh okay. Artificial intelligence introduces that fourth architecture, not another application architecture. Uh, it adds the cognitive architecture. The organization that recognizes that transition is going to be the ones who will redefine competitive advantage in the future for everyone.

Final Takeaways And Closing Reflection

Dr Ariel R King 29:33

Wow, that was such a statement. Sir B. Lee Jones, I think I would really love to have a second part of this podcast. I think uh what you're talking about is so important. I want to thank you for being with us.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

My pleasure.

Dr Ariel R King 29:49

And for our audience, remember, if I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, then when? That was by the great philosopher Hillel. And I've added if not me, then who? Thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

My pleasure. Cheers.