AI: Love It, Hate It, or Ignore It
You do not have to love AI. You do not even have to like it. But of the three positions a leader can take right now, love it, hate it, or ignore it, only two are defensible, and the one many leaders have quietly chosen is not one of them.
The lovers have a case. When used well, these tools shrink hours of rough drafting, research, and analysis into minutes. The haters have a case, too. The hype is exhausting and tied to stock prices. The output is often confidently wrong, and nobody has fully answered what this does to the 'world of work' over the horizon. I respect both camps, because both camps are paying attention.
Ignoring it is different. Ignoring it is a decision about reality, and reality keeps on keepin' on no matter how unconcerned (& less stressed) you are. McKinsey's most recent State of AI survey found that 88% of organizations now report regular AI use in at least one business function. While that seems like a large percentage, used does not necessarily mean used well and the stat says nothing about outcomes. Poor and ineffective use is still use.
Whatever your official policy says, I can assure you that
your team is likely somewhere in that number. Someone on your staff drafted an email with it this morning. Someone summarized a report. Someone pasted something into a chatbot that your legal team would rather they had not.
The leadership question is not technical
I am not going to tell you which tools to buy, even though I have my favorites. That advice ages in weeks if not days. The durable questions are leadership questions. What work do we want humans doing because humans do it better? What are our rules for what leaves the building? Who on the team is quietly excellent at this, and who is quietly terrified?
Those questions do not require a computer science degree. They require the same things every other leadership moment requires: attention, honesty, and a willingness to have the crucial conversation before the problem has the conversation for you.
What I tell the leaders I coach
Pick one task you personally do every week and try the tool on it. I can assure you, YouTube has a video on whatever you want to apply it to! For the skeptics, the goal is not to replace your judgment; it's to find out where the line between improved efficiency and your judgment actually sits. You cannot imagine, let alone set rules for something you have never touched.
Next, talk about it with your team, in the open. Set the guardrails you actually need: client data, personal data, anything you would not put in an email to a stranger. Ask who is using what. You will learn more in that one meeting than in a quarter of policy memos.
And hold one line: the tool never does the true leadership work. People decisions, performance conversations, trust repair are all firmly in the human leadership domain, and the moment you outsource those, you've lost the plot.
I watch my own kids, both in high school, planning careers around a technology that did not exist when they started middle school. Ignoring this ongoing change would be a strange thing to model for them and I feel it's even stranger thing to model for a team.
Love it or hate it. Both are fine. Just do it with your eyes open and learn enough about it to make informed decisions.
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Sources:
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai