Palantir's Shyam Sankar: Here's what executive and leaders using AI should do
Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer and executive vice president of Palantir Technologies, told Fox News Digital that artificial intelligence will be a "massively meritocratic force" within the workplace and offered advice to corporate leaders on how to best position their companies and employees for success.
As AI adoption becomes an increasingly essential part of staying ahead of the curve across industries, many executives feel growing pressure to keep pace with other corporations already leveraging the technology. Sankar explained how business leaders facing that pressure can use AI-driven disruptions of typical workflows to their advantage.
"The most important advice I'd have for corporate leaders is to recognize that AI is going to be a massively meritocratic force. It's going to upset your existing organizational structure," he told Fox News Digital.
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"You need to be highly attuned to looking at the pockets of emergent talent… the talent's always been there, but because of AI, it's so clear that they're having an impact. And in the spirit of that meritocracy, reorganize your company around the emerging talent pockets, lean into that disruption," Sankar added.
Addressing fears of doomsday scenarios in which AI replaces traditional labor and leads to mass job losses, the Palantir CTO said anxiety over technological advancements is nothing new and dates back as far as the 16th century.
"Well, of course, if we look through history, every time we have a new, profound technology, there is an incredible amount of fear," Sankar explained. "You can go back to Elizabeth I, who refused to grant a patent on a sewing machine because she thought it might lead to mass unemployment. What you really see is that we're listening to the wrong people. Every time you have one of these revolutions — whether it's the telescope, or the microscope, or the power loom — it's very tempting to listen to the inventors of the technology."
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But it is not the inventors who decide the impact of the technologies, he said. It's the people who wield the technology.
"Galileo did not invent the telescope," Sankar noted. "He used the telescope to discover planetary motion. Similarly, we are listening to the inventors of AI, when we should be listening to the people who are not invited to give op-eds, who are not asked to write essays. The frontline workers in America whose jobs are being transformed for the better with AI. How do they feel? Are they optimistic? Are they not? How do they think about their children's future in a country powered by AI? And I think you would find a very different narrative."
In his Monday op-ed with Fox News digital titled "The American people are being lied to about AI," Sankar pushed back on some of the fears and misconceptions surrounding the technology and its potential impact. He asserted that the "utopians and the doomers commit the same error" when it comes to AI: "They neglect human agency."
"AI is not a divinity. It cannot snap its fingers and eliminate jobs; people will use AI to cut jobs or create them. AI cannot decide to oppress us; people will build AI tools that either enforce privacy and civil liberties or erode them. AI did not choose to write poems or generate pornography; people chose to build cheap consumer goods rather than genuine tools of productivity," he wrote. "These are choices you and I must make every day."
Later on in the op-ed, the Palantir CTO detailed his view on how AI should be implemented in order to maximize efficiency for both businesses and the frontline workers who carry out its day-to-day operations.
"AI should eliminate bureaucracy, not add to it. No new compliance theater. No ‘AI governance’ committees designed to slow things down and centralize power in ‘managers.’ AI should empower the American worker to move faster, not slow him down," Sankar argued. "Every layer of process that stands between the frontline worker and their ability to do their job is deadweight to be destroyed."