The effects of AI on business are becoming clear as it transforms every job, every team, and every organization. With that comes both fear and opportunity. To engage in decisions and conversations about AI more thoughtfully, leaders navigating this uncertainty must get hands-on with AI, identify key experts within their business, and, together with their teams, imagine what the future looks like. Ultimately, the question is: disrupt or be disrupted? That’s why I invited Christian Muehlroth, CEO of ITONICS and an expert on innovation management, to join me on “What’s the BUZZ?”. Here is what we’ve talked about…
Getting Hands-On with AI for Leaders
If you’re waiting to “see where AI goes,” you’re already behind. One of the most common traps leaders fall into is staying in observation mode. But AI is moving too fast—sometimes week by week, definitely quarter by quarter. The only way to understand its potential for your business is to get hands-on.
This doesn’t mean you need to become a data scientist or master every prompting technique. It means using AI as a thought partner for your own work. Ask it to challenge your assumptions, stress-test your strategies, or help you prepare for high-stakes presentations. Leaders who engage this way don’t just learn the tools—they build “AI muscle” and model curiosity for their teams.
Avoiding the tools only reinforces fear and uncertainty. By contrast, when leaders explore AI directly, they start to see where it creates value, where it falls short, and how their organizations can move beyond hype. The first step is opening the tools on your laptop or phone and asking, “What can this help me do today?”
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Amid the noise about AI replacing jobs, there’s a critical truth: expertise has never been more valuable. AI generates fluent, confident output, often mixing fact with fiction. Without experts, organizations can’t tell the difference. That’s why the real opportunity is to equip experts with AI rather than replace them. In business functions like finance, legal, marketing, or operations, your people know the nuances of what good looks like. When they use AI to amplify their knowledge, they spot flaws quickly, scale their insights, and unlock impact that entry-level staff or raw AI outputs cannot deliver.
For leaders, this means identifying where your experts sit across the organization and giving them tools, training, and safe sandboxes to experiment. It also means shifting performance measures. Instead of valuing headcount as a proxy for influence, begin valuing amplified expertise and the business outcomes it drives. In this way, AI makes human contribution indispensable.
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Too many organizations treat AI as just the next wave of automation. That’s shortsighted. Automation can save costs, but the deeper opportunity is reimagination. AI reduces cognitive constraints, opening the door to new products, services, and even industries. But we’re in a deficit of imagination. Many teams are stuck reacting to the latest tools rather than asking bigger questions: What customer frustrations could we solve with these capabilities? How could we redesign our services if time and cost barriers disappeared? What entirely new value could we bring to market?
Leaders must create space for this exploration. Use workshops, design sprints, or strategy sessions where AI itself is part of the ideation process. Encourage teams not just to automate what they do today, but to dream bigger about what tomorrow could look like. The companies that thrive will be the ones that invent futures their competitors never imagined.
Summary
AI creates uncertainty, but it also creates possibilities. As a leader, your role is not to have all the answers, but to guide your people through the unknown with clarity and vision. That’s why it’s so important to gain hands-on experience with AI, understand its value firsthand, leverage expertise to amplify your team's existing knowledge, and lead with imagination to unlock opportunities beyond automation.
The future of work isn’t written yet. It will be defined by those who are willing to explore, experiment, and reimagine what’s possible. If you step into that role now, you’ll create the conditions for your teams to thrive today, tomorrow, and beyond.
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This is a crucial framework for leaders. The call to move beyond observation and build 'AI muscle' is exactly right. I've observed that the most significant ROI emerges when leaders shift from asking if AI applies to their business to personally experimenting with how it can reshape their core workflows and strategic assumptions. This leadership theme is something I explore in The Efficiency Playbook. - https://efficiencyplaybook.substack.com/
This is a crucial framework for leaders. The call to move beyond observation and build 'AI muscle' is exactly right. I've observed that the most significant ROI emerges when leaders shift from asking if AI applies to their business to personally experimenting with how it can reshape their core workflows and strategic assumptions. This leadership theme is something I explore in The Efficiency Playbook. - https://efficiencyplaybook.substack.com/