Artificial intelligence has burst onto the corporate scene with overwhelming force, but also with a good dose of confusion. Within the framework of space #BankingCaixa Popular Company and the Cátedra de Empresa y Humanismo (CEiH), the day “AI in companies in the Valencian Community: what is happening and how to take advantage of it in your SME” shed light on this transformation.
Thomas Gonzalez-Cruz, director of the Chair and PhD in Economics and professor of Business Management at the University of Valencia, focused on an uncomfortable but necessary reality: AI is new to everyone And, before sending staff to take courses without a strategy behind them, it is urgent to first understand what this technology is and how we can actually apply it to generate a new business.
Adoption statuses: Where is the Valencian company?
The deployment of AI in the business sector is not uniform. Organizations are currently going through different stages: from initial training and exploring use cases, to launching experimental pilot projects.
However, the current picture reveals a clear duality:
- Skeptical or lagging SMEs: Many small and medium-sized enterprises operate under the premise of "We're already doing well just by optimizing processes; there's no need to do more."A tactical approach that, while efficient in the short term, limits the true transformative potential of technology.
- The risk of "Shadow AI": The silent danger of those organizations that begin to adopt AI tools in a scattered way, through individual employee initiatives and without any central coordination or governance.
Strategic AI It shouldn't just be used to do the same things faster. The real competitive leap happens when it's used for personalization, predictive analytics, and ultimately, for creating new business models.
The paradoxes and concerns of the human factor
The session bluntly addressed the ethical and human resource management challenges that keep management committees up at night. Currently, Spanish companies are grappling with the extreme difficulty of finding qualified external candidates and the urgent need to implement internal training and promotion programs.
Furthermore, the anthropological factor leaves a very clear paradox in current leadership:
- The loss of skills: Managers are showing real concern about the risk that excessive delegation to algorithms will lead to an atrophy of their employees' abilities and critical judgment.
- The substitution bias: Interestingly, while there are fears about the impact on staff tasks, leaders do not perceive AI as being able to replace their own capabilities when making strategic decisions.
The strategic roadmap: six questions to move into action
To guide companies through this digital labyrinth, Tomás González-Cruz proposed structuring the start of any project around six fundamental questions that every management committee should answer. The process begins by defining whether there is an AI manager within the company and by precisely identifying what data we have and where it is stored. From there, it is vital to assess the training and cultural landscape, confirming whether we have a basic AI training plan for the entire organization and whether we encourage its everyday use in employees' daily tasks. Finally, security and ethics complete the picture: it is essential to design a responsible AI use policy and establish strict controls over what sensitive data is being entered into external tools.
The conclusion we reached at this meeting between Caixa Popular and the Chair calls for calm and business prudence: competitive advantage will not come from incorporating the most sophisticated tool on the market, but from implementing clear governance that prepares people to lead technology with sound judgment.
