Sharmla Chetty: When Machines Have the Answers, Questions Are the Edge (Duke CE)
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Duke CE chief executive Sharmla Chetty on why most organisations adopted AI faster than they built the capability to govern it, and what genuine AI readiness actually requires.
Most organisations have adopted AI faster than they can govern it. Among the companies Duke CE works with, close to six in ten have embedded AI into their operations, but fewer than one in five have the governance to match.
Sharmla Chetty is chief executive of Duke Corporate Education, which works with leaders in more than 80 countries. She joins Garrick Jones and Simon Brown to argue that AI readiness is not a technology test. It is three tests: capability, trust and governance and organisations keep failing on the last two long before technology becomes the problem.
She makes a claim that sits at the centre of this show's argument: when machines hold all the answers, the human edge moves to the questions. The defining question of a career is no longer what you know, but how fast you can learn what you don't.
In this conversation:
- Why leaders now run two workforces, human and digital with no playbook for either
- The three tests of genuine AI readiness, and why fewer than one in five organisations pass the governance one
- Why AI firms are hiring philosophy graduates over technology graduates
- How Sharmla learned to build agents from her 18-year-old nephew, and what he told her about coding
- Why curiosity is a leading indicator and performance is a lagging one
- Trust as a strategic asset: what riding a 2am bus with miners taught her about a safety problem that turned out to be a trust problem
- The bifurcation risk — and why leaving economies behind is a leadership failure, not an inevitability
Find Sharmla on LinkedIn and learn more about Duke Corporate Education
00:00 Introduction
01:14 Curiosity as a way of being
03:05 Leading two workforces
06:21 The skills that matter now
07:59 Learning agents from an 18-year-old
09:13 Who owns the AI conversation
11:05 Why AI firms hire philosophers
14:09 Can education keep pace
17:30 What AI-ready actually means
22:14 The bifurcation risk
25:38 Curiosity as a leading indicator
28:12 Performance intelligence
30:40 Trust as a strategic asset
32:53 Riding the bus with the miners
33:51 What CHROs are worried about
40:57 Sharmla's one takeaway