Its no surprise that A.I. implementation comes with a steep learning curve. That doesnt mean its not worth the trouble. 

If youre hoping to be a future-focused business leader, you need to force yourself to use A.I., Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, told Fortunes Peter Vanham last week during an interview on Fortune Connect, Fortunes executive leadership community. 

Whether or not youre already a tech whiz, or even whether your specific role relies on generative A.I. like ChatGPT, its incumbent upon leaders to get up-to-speed on its applications and potential next turns. Thats certainly the case for Tagen. He manages the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is the worlds largest single investor. The fund has a stake in over 9,000 global companiesincluding Apple, Nestlé, Microsoft, and Samsungand owns about 1.5% of all the listed companies in the world.

As with the bulk of Fortune 500 giants, A.I. adoption is impossible to overlook; and neither executives nor rank-and-file workers should wait to upskill. A recent Fortune survey of Fortune 500 CEOs found that predictive A.I., which is best for analyzing reams of databy a landslideis the technology they expect to create the most opportunities for business in the next decade. 

Hailing from an older generationor just simply being out of touchis no excuse, Tangen said. If youre an older person, and you dont really have experience, get some of the young guys to help you, Tangen advised. The new iterations of A.I. have kind of turned the value of seniority upside down a bit, he added. 

But young workers may beg to differ. The idea that the younger you are, the more you know about A.I. could be a misnomer. Nearly 40% of Gen Z workers said they dont believe their college education adequately prepared them for the tech-related needs of the modern workplace, per a recent Dell Technologies survey. Over half said they have very basic or even zero digital know-how. Luckily, having grown up very online, theyre more likely to catch on quickly and become A.I. natives. 

And ultimately, young workers educating older workers is a good thing, Tangen said. Its a very democratic software; you can be an idiot like me and get value out of it, because you basically just talk to the machine, he laughed. Its really unbelievably powerful.

Harnessing the power

Tangens expectations and concerns align squarely with those of other major executives. Andy Bird, CEO of education giant Pearson Education, recently told Fortune Connect that to remain competitive in the job market, most workers have no choice but to become A.I.-fluent. 

In many ways, technology and A.I. are moving faster than real life, Bird said. Were struggling to catch up, and the impact that that has on us both as individuals and as companies is the need to continually re-skill and upskill.

Indeed, A.I. has made its way into daily operations at thousands of businesses. On any given day at French pharma and healthcare giant Sanofi, 9,000 people10% of the companyare using A.I., its CEO Paul Hudson told Fortune Connect. There are going to be companies that [dont adopt A.I., and] really try to hold everybody back, Hudson added. I think they wont be able to compete.

Tangen echoed Hudson and Bird, saying A.I. is just a completely transformative thing. Applications like ChatGPT and its ever-expanding list of competitors will transform everything people do, within and beyond the office. 

Its happening very fast in my mindits a bit like being on Apollo 11, going out into space, Tangen told Vanham. Its really exciting, but its also a bit scary at the same time. And while large-scale implementation can seem daunting, Tangen is keeping his eyes on the immediate future. 

We just need to target 10% productivity improvement in the firm over the next 12 months, he said. That shouldnt be too difficult; a recent study from MIT and Stanford found that A.I. improves worker productivity by 14%. Thats good news for bosses and workers alikeso long as they dont work in jobs that A.I. might steal.

The commission can be called on in cases of disputes over the restitution of Nazi-confiscated cultural property, especially Jewish property.

In the case of the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein Weyermann and Irma Lewenstein Klein versus Bayerische Landesbank, the commission advised that the 1907 painting The Colorful Life by Russian artist Kandinsky be returned to the heirs.

The commissions recommendations are non-binding but are mostly followed by the parties once they have agreed to call on it to resolve the conflict.

The large tempera painting shows a group of colorfully clad people on a lawn, some eating or playing music, while others seem to be dancing.

In its conclusion, the commission says that from November 1927, the painting belonged to Hedwig and Emanuel Albert Lewenstein, a Jewish couple living in Amsterdam, and was part of their extensive art collection. The painting was auctioned off on Oct. 9, 1940 just a few months after Germanys Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands at an auction house in Amsterdam.

Before the auction, the piece had been on loan from the Lewenstein family to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, from where it was taken on Sept. 5, 1940 by order of the art dealer Abraham Mozes Querido, the commission said in a statement.

Despite years of research, the commission said it was unable to trace the path of the painting.

It cannot be proven on whose initiative the painting was sold as part of the Lewenstein estate to the auction house Frederik Muller & Co. at the auction, the commission said.

It added that the art piece was acquired by Salomon B. Slijper, whose widow sold it to Bayerische Landesbank in 1972 for 900,000 Dutch guilders. Since then, it has been on loan to the Staedtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau museum in Munich.

At the time of the 1940 auction, the children of Hedwig and Emanuel Albert Lewenstein Robert Gotschalk Lewenstein and Wilhelmine Helene Lewenstein had emigrated to the United States and to then-Portuguese colony of Mozambique, respectively.

Only Irma Lewenstein Klein remained in Amsterdam she was Roberts separated wife. She survived the Nazi occupation and World War II.

In the dispute over the paintings ownership, the Bayerische Landesbank suggested that Irma Lewenstein Klein had put up the painting for auction in connection with her divorce settlement.

The claimants, however, were of the opinion that the auction of the painting took place in connection with the Netherlands occupation by the Nazis and the systematic persecution of the Jewish population that followed.

After studying the historic evidence, the commission concluded the painting was seized as a result of persecution. The Lewenstein family and Irma Lewenstein Klein were persecuted as Jews from the beginning of the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, it said.

There is no evidence to support the assumption that Irma Lewenstein Klein arranged for the painting to be handed over of her own free will, the statement added.

There were no immediate reactions by the heirs or the Bavarian state bank.

People want to do business with companies that care about their customers, the Shark Tank star argued in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published on Sunday.

With that, Cuban pushed back against a rising tide of criticism aimed at companies that embrace social causes outside of their core businessand took a side into a heated debate over businesss role in society.

There is a reason almost all the top 10 market cap companies in the U.S. can be considered woke, said Cuban, who is also owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team. Its good business.

Cultural issues

Companies have staked out positions on often divisive cultural issues in recent years in part because public relations consultants told them to do so. Firms like Edelman have argued that the best way to end up on the shopping list of predominantly progressive Gen Z consumers over the next 10-20 years is to support issues near and dear to them, including LGBTQ rights and environmental causes.

But this advice has come into question after Bud Lights brief partnership at the start of April with transgender social media star Dylan Mulvaney was met with an impromptu boycott that led demand for Anheuser-Buschs popular beer to plummet.

Over Memorial Day, the backlash became so bad that people posted images of fully-stocked shelves of Bud Light next to ads offering the lager at a steep discount.

Conservatives celebrated the Bud Light boycott as a victory against what they call woke capitalism, which has been blamed for everything from Texas power outages to the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bankeven when the root causes of the failures, such as failing to hedge a securities portfolio against interest rate risks, lay elsewhere.

In a bid to quell concern among stockholders, the CEO of parent company AB InBev, Michel Doukeris, emphasized the promotion was not part of a dedicated campaign but involved just one can sent to one influencer for one Instagram post. 

His climbdown did not help: shares in the mega-brewer have fallen 17% since the controversy began, versus a near 6% gain in the broader S&P 500 index.

Long-term benefits

The original motive for corporations to embrace issues like diversity was that doing so offered direct benefits to company directors interested in weatherproofing their businesses against unforeseen events. 

Top officials at the European Central Bank, for example, have argued a lack of diversity played a major factor in the lead-up to the 2008 global financial crisis. 

It was evident throughout the financial, political and regulatory system and contributed to the depth and impact of the crisis, concluded Ed Dibley, at the time an ECB supervisory board member, a decade later. This is one reason we are emphasizing diversity of thought so highly, as it acts as a bulwark against groupthink. 

For investors like Blackrock, supporting businesses that want to change to more climate-friendly technologies is as much a financial decision as it is a public relations one.

Professional money managers like pension funds do not want to own companies that may have billions of dollars worth of stranded assets on their balance sheet, like oil rigs, coal mines or power plants that burn fossil fuels. 

Wait out the storm?

Cubans advice to AB InBevs Doukeris and other corporate boardrooms meanwhile is not to panic, but to wait out the storm. 

Most CEOs have enough experience to know to just wait out the news cycle until they go to the next one, he said.

Weeks after Mulvaneys Instagram post, however, the topic does not appear to be going away, and the brand is running out of time before permanent damage is done, according to a former Anheuser-Busch sales executive. 

Cubans own fellow Shark Tank star, Kevin OLeary, even warned the risk posed by platforms like Instagram and TikTok now needs to be carefully analyzed by corporate directors, and even proposed a new board committee alongside those focusing on audit and compliance to deal with communications and media.

It took decades to create the American beer, and exactly 32 hours to destroy it. So when you cant control the message anymore through social media, which is clearly obvious, you better figure out what message youre putting out before it ever gets out there, OLeary said last week.