Your Leadership Team Is Embarrassingly Behind on AI (And It's About to Cost You Everything)
Wake up call: While you're "evaluating the strategic implications," your competition is eating your lunch
Let me tell you about the most expensive delusion in corporate Sweden right now.
It's the C-suite executive who thinks AI is a "technical implementation" that can be delegated to IT while they focus on "real strategy." It's the leadership team that spent six months forming an AI committee to evaluate potential use cases while their 23-year-old customer service rep has been cranking out better help documentation with ChatGPT since breakfast.
Here's the brutal truth:
If you're in a leadership position and you're not personally using AI for your actual work, you're not just behind—you're actively sabotaging your organization's future.
I know this because I've been having these conversations with Swedish leadership teams for months now, and the pattern is both predictable and infuriating. Johannes Sundlo (guest on my latest podcast, awesome episode, give it a listen), who's probably forgotten more about organizational AI than most executives will ever learn, put it perfectly: "The people sitting in leadership teams are often further behind than the organization itself."
Let me translate that for you: Your people are already living in the future. You're still debating whether to visit.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Executive AI Ignorance
Here's a story that should make you uncomfortable.
A major Swedish company's HR director calls Johannes to send her team to AI training. Great, right? But when he asks if she'll attend herself, she waves it off: "That's not for me. This is more of a question for people further down in the organization. Not really a strategic question."
Not. Strategic.
Are you kidding me?
This is like saying "electricity isn't strategic" in 1920, or "the internet isn't strategic" in 1995. Except worse, because this time the transformation is happening in months, not decades.
When Johannes asked her how she planned to design her organization for an AI future without understanding what was technically possible, something clicked. She joined the program and is now light-years ahead of her peers.
But here's what pisses me off: She's the positive exception (trying to upskill her teams).
Most executives are still sitting with their blindfolds on hoping this will blow over soon.
Stop Being Precious About Your Leadership Style
I get it. You've spent decades building your leadership intuition. You know how to read a room, build consensus, and make tough calls. That experience matters.
But if you think AI is going to diminish that, you're missing the point so spectacularly that I question whether you should be making strategic decisions at all.
AI doesn't replace leadership judgment. It amplifies it. But only if you actually use the damn thing.
Here is a great mid-2025 breakdown of AI-usecases for leadership teams. Its not exhaustive, but will get you started:
Be Your Own Guinea Pig
Stop asking other people to experiment with AI while you observe from a safe distance. That's not leadership.
Start with something that matters: your actual decision-making process. Before your next big strategic call, ask AI to roleplay your harshest critics. Not your usual yes-men, but the people who think your plan is garbage.
"Take the perspective of our most skeptical frontline manager and tear this proposal apart."
"Act like our biggest competitor's CEO. What would they do to counter this strategy?"
"Be the angry customer who thinks we're completely missing the point."
You'll get feedback you'd never hear otherwise, because guess what? People don't tell executives the truth. AI doesn't give a shit about your feelings. GREAT usecase for AI!
2. Turn Your Meetings Into Intelligence Operations
Here's something that'll separate you from the executive dinosaurs: AI-powered meeting analysis that actually makes your decisions better.
Get an AI agent to listen to your leadership meetings and generate decision protocols that include blind spot analysis. "Based on this discussion, here are the critical factors you completely ignored that will probably fuck up this decision."
I know a leadership team that does this religiously. They call it their "reality check protocol." The number of stupid decisions they've avoided is honestly embarrassing - embarrassing because it reveals how many blind spots they had before.
But here's the key: This only works if your team can handle being told they're wrong. If your leadership culture is built on ego protection rather than truth-seeking, AI feedback will just make you defensive.
3. Become a Research Machine
Want to know how far behind you are? Time yourself doing competitive analysis the old way. Email some analyst. Schedule calls. Wait for reports. Synthesize findings. What's that take you? Two weeks? A month?
Now watch this (deep research mode activated): "Research how our top 5 competitors have responded to similar market shifts in the past 18 months. Identify patterns in their strategies and highlight what we might be missing based on our current approach."
Twenty minutes later, you have a comprehensive analysis that would have taken your strategy team weeks to produce.
But don't stop at external research. Use it to pressure-test your own thinking: "Here's our expansion strategy. Research companies that tried similar approaches and failed. What killed them?"
If you're not doing this level of rapid intelligence gathering, you're making decisions with incomplete information while your AI-enabled competitors are playing with full visibility.
4. Scale Without Becoming a Generic Corporate Robot
Here's where most executives screw this up: They let AI write everything and end up sounding like every other soulless corporate communication you've ever ignored.
Don't be that person.
Use AI as your communication architect, not your ghostwriter. Record yourself explaining your strategy, vision, or decision rationale. Then have AI help you structure and refine it while keeping your actual voice and thinking intact.
The goal isn't to sound like AI wrote it. The goal is to sound like you, but clearer, more structured, and adapted for different audiences.
You can now generate personalized communications for different stakeholder groups, translate complex strategies for frontline teams, or adapt your messaging for different cultural contexts—all while maintaining your authentic leadership voice.
If you're not doing this, you're either under-communicating or spending way too much time crafting messages that could be automated.
Lead the Transformation (Don't Just Talk About It)
This is the part that separates real leaders from leadership-team tourists: You can't delegate AI strategy while remaining AI-illiterate yourself.
Your people are watching what you do, not what you say. If you're still doing your strategic thinking the same way you did in 2020, why would they believe AI matters?
Start sharing your AI experiments in leadership meetings. "I used AI to analyze our Q3 data and found three patterns our traditional reporting missed." Or: "I tested our new policy with AI personas representing different employee segments—turns out our communication was completely tone-deaf to remote workers."
This isn't about showing off. It's about demonstrating that AI enhances human judgment rather than replacing it.
The Questions That Reveal Whether You're Serious
If you're still with me (and not busy updating your LinkedIn with AI-generated thought leadership), here are the questions that actually matter:
How do you stay authentically you in an AI-saturated world? Because let's be honest—LinkedIn is already unreadable garbage because everyone sounds the same. Don't add to that pile.
What happens when AI can do most coordination and coaching tasks? Middle management is about to get decimated. Have you figured out what human value remains, or are you just hoping this problem goes away?
Who owns the productivity gains from AI? When your people use AI to finish work in 2 hours instead of 8, does that extra time belong to them or the company? Your answer reveals whether you're building a sustainable AI culture or just extracting more value from the same people.
The Brutal Timeline You're Ignoring
Here's what's actually happening while you're "evaluating frameworks":
Companies that integrated AI into their leadership decision-making six months ago are now making better strategic choices faster than their traditional competitors. They're identifying opportunities sooner, avoiding costly mistakes through better perspective-taking, and scaling their strategic capabilities in ways that seemed impossible last year.
Meanwhile, leadership teams that are "taking a measured approach" are falling behind in ways they don't even understand yet.
This isn't early adopter territory anymore. In mid-2025, if you're not actively using AI for strategic work, you're already late. Not fashionably late. Embarrassingly late.
The technology exists. The tools work. The only remaining variable is whether you'll stop making excuses and start leading the transformation.
What Happens to Leaders Who Don't Adapt
I've been thinking about what separates leaders who thrive in AI-augmented environments from those who become irrelevant.
It's not about becoming a prompt engineering expert or understanding transformer architectures. It's about experiencing firsthand how AI changes the nature of strategic work, then helping your organization navigate that change authentically.
But here's the thing you can't bullshit your way around: You cannot lead a transformation you haven't personally experienced.
If you've never felt the cognitive expansion that comes from AI-assisted perspective-taking, how can you help your team integrate that capability? If you've never experienced the speed of AI-powered research, how can you redesign your decision-making processes to take advantage of it?
You can't.
Time to Choose
The comfortable delusion is over. You can't delegate AI strategy while remaining personally ignorant about AI capabilities. You can't lead an AI transformation from the sidelines.
Your organization needs leaders who understand both the possibilities and limitations of AI—not from reading reports, but from daily use in high-stakes strategic work.
The leaders who figure this out will build organizations that make better decisions faster, communicate more effectively, and adapt to market changes with unprecedented speed.
The ones who don't will spend the next two years wondering why their "experienced leadership team" keeps getting outmaneuvered by smaller, more agile competitors.
Which leader are you going to be?
Because honestly, watching from the sidelines isn't leadership. It's just expensive spectating.
Start today, or explain later why you didn't.
