Real AI Leadership Isn’t About AI — It’s About Change

Let's be honest – most leaders right now don't have to focus as much on how to lead their teams within an AI-centric environment. What most leaders need to do right now is lead their teams to fully and effectively embrace AI.

According to MIT Sloan Management Review:

“Despite two years of broad managerial attention and extensive experimentation, we are not seeing the large-scale GenAI-powered business transformations that many people initially envisioned.”

So what should real AI leadership look like today, for most organizations?

I've helped teams move from manually processing thousands of complex healthcare claims to having AI handle the heavy lifting while growing business volume 24x with only 4x the headcount. No humans were replaced - headcount actually grew substantially, just at a much slower rate than business growth. The technology was great, but the most important factor was leadership that understood one critical principle:

AI adoption isn't about the AI. It's about providing teams the roadmap and the support to effect meaningful business change.

Real AI leadership right now looks like this:

🎯 Stop waiting for the perfect AI strategy. Start with one workflow that's painful for your team and experiment together. Learn what works by doing, not by planning.

🎯 Make it safe to fail fast. Your people need to know that experimenting with AI and hitting roadblocks won't count against them. Create space for initial failures that ultimately lead to success.

🎯 Be specific about boundaries. Determine together with your team exactly where change is needed, and where it's okay to experiment and where it isn’t. Security matters, and some business processes may be too delicate or critical to change, but paralysis - whether from lack of clarity or fear of change - kills innovation.

🎯 Find your experts and champions. Identify who on your team is knowledgeable and naturally curious about AI and empower them to lead projects. If you lack internal expertise, bring in external help to achieve your first wins. Success breeds success, and early champions become your best evangelists.

The leaders who get this right aren't usually the ones who understand AI transformer architectures, and the companies winning with AI don’t necessarily have the most technical team or the largest AI budget. 

Successful AI leaders understand that AI adoption is fundamentally about business process understanding and human behavior change. These leaders find champions to help them lead the charge, snowball small AI wins into big AI wins, and continually support and celebrate their teams throughout the process.

To get started – Work with your team to identify one workflow you can start to reimagine with AI next week. Not next quarter. Next week.