AI isn’t coming. It is already here.
It has reshaped how we work, make decisions, and deliver value across every function in every industry. This transformation is happening whether your organization has a formal AI strategy or not.
So the question isn’t if AI should be adopted.
The real question is: “who’s leading it, and what happens when no one does?”
While leadership debates strategic approaches, your teams are already deep in experimentation. Some are automating workflows, while others are running analyses with embedded copilots or creating content in seconds with ChatGPT. The movement is happening, and if you, as a leader, aren’t providing the vision and guardrails, you’re relying on luck to keep innovation within safe bounds.
AI isn’t replacing leaders, it’s redefining them.
With AI automating many traditional operational and management tasks, leadership is becoming more about ethical decision-making, steering human-AI collaboration, and navigating the social impact of emerging technology. As Harsha Srivatsa puts it, “the role of a modern leader includes cultivating flexible teams and nimble execution models. In a world where slow resource reallocation leads to missed opportunities, leaders must proactively design teams and decision processes for adaptability and speed.”
Leading in an AI world requires a different approach entirely. Let's use my L.E.A.D. framework to see how it can be made easier.
L – LOOK AND LEAP: Set the Vision Before the Tech Sets It for You
Great leaders don’t just react to what’s happening. They look ahead and leap before everyone else.
This leap-first mentality is especially critical in AI adoption because experimentation is already accelerating across your organization, often without formal oversight. What you need to do is provide the strategic clarity that transforms scattered experiments into coordinated business impact.
A 2023 McKinsey report shows that 60% of execs say those who use AI to drive outcomes will advance faster in their careers. Bosky Mukherjee calls this "credibility acceleration."
According to her, the ones who get promoted in the AI era are those who:
Test AI to solve real problems
Use AI to create clarity across teams
Share early thinking
Reposition their role as a driver of momentum
Show how AI turns insight into impact
She even gives us proof. One of her clients, a marketing leader who was concerned about stalled sales despite increased messaging efforts, reframed her team’s messaging using customer feedback gathered with the help of AI. Within a week, two stalled deals moved forward, and she was asked to lead the company’s AI efforts across sales and marketing. The takeaway isn’t about using AI or not, it’s about delivering results that others can’t.
E – EMPOWER AND EXCITE: Don’t Wait to Be Ready and Create Safe Space to Experiment
Once you've committed to leading AI adoption, your next challenge is channeling your team's existing experimentation into productive innovation.
You face pressure from two directions:
Upward: Your teams need freedom to innovate with clear boundaries.
Downward: Your board needs answers about the future and strategic insight.
Your job is to:
Set direction: What specific outcomes are we trying to unlock?
Draw boundaries: What can’t be done, so everything else is fair game?
Protect what matters: IP, trust, compliance, security, and brand.
Align decision-makers: Get boards, legal, and finance on the same page.
Create momentum: Eliminate friction, not oversight.
As much as it would be great to say “open the floodgates and figure it out as you go along”… a big part of a leader’s job is to define guardrails.
This applies to any other area, as it does to AI. Without clear boundaries, your team isn’t sure what’s encouraged and what’s off-limits. When people know the limits, they gain freedom to create, build, and explore. Or, as Sheri Jacobs puts it based on decades of research, they “embrace boundaries as fuel, not fences.”
A psychologist once told me to imagine myself on the top of an extremely tall skyscraper on a very gusty day and added that there was no barrier on the outer edges of the platform. She asked where I would stand on the roof. My response “in the middle” was not unexpected. Then she requested me to picture a railing around the edge and asked again where I would stand. I was more open to approaching the edge and even willing to look over it to see how high up we were.
This is the same thing leaders do by providing limitations on where NOT to go. They provide safety for exploration into otherwise scary territory.
Just as your team needs guardrails to innovate confidently, your board needs clarity to support AI initiatives strategically.
According to Sonita Lontoh, a board director and technology executive, boards don't need to become AI experts, but they must become AI literate. That means they need clarity around how AI connects to business goals, not technical demonstrations on AI’s capabilities.
In Lontoh’s words:
“There’s a disconnect between technology initiatives and the business outcomes they’re meant to deliver. Boards don’t need tech demos. They need to know: is this helping us grow revenue, reduce costs, retain customers?”
As an executive, part of your job is to translate AI experimentation into business strategy. That strategy must be expressed in financial terms the board understands: revenue impact, corporate risk, and growth opportunity.
Here are a few questions every board should be asking, AND every leader should be ready to answer:
How is AI changing our competitive landscape?
Where are we exposed to risk because of AI?
What strategic investments should we be making now to power an AI future?
How are we moving from AI insight to business impact?
If you can’t answer those yet, it’s time to get curious…or serious… fast! The leadership vacuum around AI is perhaps the greatest risk your organization faces right now. Without your guidance connecting team experimentation to company-level strategy, you'll either move too cautiously (losing competitive advantage) or too recklessly (creating unnecessary risk).
A – ALIGN AND ACTIVATE: Elevate the Conversation with Your Board and Executive Team
Now that you’ve set boundaries and are actively managing risk, it’s time to think about deploying capital strategically and flexibly.
AI unlocks efficiency, but what you do with the time or money saved is what defines your leadership. Will you return it to shareholders? Or reinvest it in innovation, differentiation, and customer value? How about investing in training your existing staff who are familiar with your customer problems so that they can be part of your company’s future and not left behind?
It’s like Roshan Gupta says in this post: “Parkinson’s Law kicks in. Tasks will expand to fill the time you’ve saved.” Similarly, budgets will be gobbled up even if teams become more efficient. Could that time or budget be used for higher impact activities? Of course it can….but leaders need to insist on that being the case.
Leaders need to be encouraging everyone to be thinking critically about what will get the company closer to where it wants to go. At the market level, it’s not just your team that’s moving faster; your competitors are too. If everyone is rushing into the same AI-powered niches without a clear strategy, it creates the risk of commoditization. Over-competition results when too many players rush into the same AI-powered opportunities. We get what Harsha Srivatsa calls “overfishing”: market saturation that leads to diminishing returns.
Smart leaders think beyond just jumping into hot areas and instead focus on long-term differentiation and sustained value. All in the direction of where you want to go.
However, alignment isn't just about strategy, it's about culture. This isn't solo work.
The kind of organizational culture that thrives with AI isn’t one built on titles, it’s built on trust. As Noel DeJesus puts it in “Artificial Allies”, “peer leadership involves individuals leading and influencing their peers rather than leading from a hierarchical position. It promotes collaboration and teamwork, fostering community and shared responsibility. Peer leaders develop strong communication, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence skills, balancing their own needs with those of their peers.”
D – DECIDE AND DEPUTIZE: Accelerate Momentum with Smart Guardrails
With strategic alignment in place, effective AI leadership comes down to execution: making clear decisions and scaling your impact through others. Leadership in the AI era means stepping up, speaking clearly, and sharing ownership.
That starts with decisiveness. Kill ambiguity, explain your logic, and communicate tradeoffs.
But the second part is just as important: deputizing.
It’s not enough to make decisions. You have to create a network of trusted people who understand your principles and can execute them.
You don’t scale by doing everything yourself. In fact, it’s time to retire the old adage: “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” In the age of AI, the better version is: “If you want something done right again and again, deputize someone (or something) to do it for you.”
That "something" might be an AI agent trained to follow your process, apply your thinking, and scale your impact. That "someone" might be your direct report, and you should empower them to train their own agents too.
Protecting Your Organization’s Future: The Real AI Advantage Is Human (YOU)
Though much of the advice provided centers on being flexible and enabling innovation, part of the crucial fences leaders must place around AI is often overlooked.
Right now, most AI tooling is built on just a few dominant platforms. Even if they are different corporate entities, the partnerships that exist between front-end and back-end AI tools and the infrastructure they are built on have clear lines that generally connect to three big players. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have their hands in practically everything related to AI.
Often, businesses select a technical stack that leverages those forged partnerships. That centralization offers short-term efficiency, but it also introduces long-term risk: vendor lock-in, rising costs, and less flexibility to evolve.
If you don't know which AI stack your organization is gravitating toward, now is the time to find out. Without evaluation of the long-term business impact of that stack, you could be building innovation on a foundation you don't control. If the costs skyrocket, profitability will plummet, and the return on investment in AI disappears like a puff of smoke. This strategic oversight is perhaps the quickest way to undermine all the opportunities AI brings.
That’s why this isn't just a technology conversation, it’s a strategy one too. Your AI choices shape how your teams operate, how your customers experience value, and how resilient your business becomes over time.
Conclusion: Don’t Let the Future Happen Without You
Leadership isn't a title, it's a behavior.
The leaders who rise to the top won't be those with the most AI knowledge, it will be the ones who build trust, create momentum, and drive results while others are still waiting to feel ready.
In his Reforge AI Strategy course, Ravi Mehta defends that to navigate these changes effectively, leaders must shift from static plans to dynamic strategy cycles. Annual planning isn’t fast enough anymore. Leaders need to update roadmaps multiple times a year, and give their teams space to explore, not just execute. Leadership isn’t about locking in decisions, it’s about adjusting to change while still anchoring in the long-term vision.
If these ideas resonated, why not book me for a talk at your organization? My “How to L.E.A.D. in the Age of AI” session breaks down the key behaviors leaders need today… and tomorrow. It’s designed to spark action, build confidence, and help your team move from hesitation to impact.
Let’s unleash the leaders within your organization! (with AI like my chatbot of course ;)
Hi! I'm Tami, and I transform tech executives and their teams into stronger leaders, ones that master influence and maximize impact. Through dynamic group trainings and meaningful one-on-one coaching sessions, I share how to leverage my L.E.A.D. framework to make every vision a reality. I provide actionable advice which strengthens leaders' influence and impact. If you're ready to Unleash the Leader Within you or your team, schedule a chat with me to discuss your goals.
Great writing Tami and thank you for including the example of my client in my program.
Your framework addressing leadership in AI adoption resonates with the core challenge I see: organizational readiness lags AI capability. Leaders who shift from directing tasks to orchestrating human-AI collaboration while maintaining human judgment create the conditions for sustainable transformation. The tension between innovation velocity and organizational stability is where strategic communication becomes critical.