AI Leadership: Why Hands on Experience Matters

Talking 'Bout My Generation

For leaders of my generation, the path to 'AI nativeness' isn't theoretical—it's experiential. True understanding requires getting hands-on.

For those of us who went to school before the birth of the internet, research was a physical process: a library, a card catalogue, a Dewey Decimal number, and occasionally, a microfiche reader. A decade later, this shifted to keyword searches on AltaVista or early Google.

Today you ask your computer a question using AI, and if you're like me you don't use the keyboard, you talk to it.

Often, the end result of an investigation is a new kind of output, such as a prototype website. I find this is often the most effective way to iterate on an idea and deepen my understanding. This isn't about becoming a developer. It's about collapsing the time between idea and execution. I can now test a hypothesis or visualize a new customer experience in minutes, not weeks.

This speed of iteration is a fundamental shift in how we can approach innovation and de-risk new ventures. That's a 10 to 15 minute process end-to-end, mostly running in background and by using my voice it requires no more than a minute or two on the keyboard.

I don't have to imagine where my idea can go, I can see it and immediately iterate....immediately. This represents more than an increase in speed; it's a fundamental change in my method of working and thinking.

Mindset before Mastery

Setting the technology aside, here's the key point. I can accomplish significantly more today than I ever could before. If I'd stuck with the way I used to work in my twenties, I'd be irrelevant in the workforce.

If your mindset is that your future tools of productivity are Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams or some kind of slightly more contemporary tooling - think Slack, Notion, all of them with AI bolted in; it's time to extend your thinking. This bolting in is important and will continue to expand, but it is just the early response from existing vendors as more extensive changes start to wash through.

Relying solely on the AI features embedded in our current software stack (Microsoft 365, Slack, etc.) is a defensive posture. It helps with incremental efficiency, but it binds us to old mental models and blinds us to the offensive opportunities of building entirely new, AI-native processes.

The real disruption will come from rethinking workflows from the ground up, not just enhancing old ones.

Having been deeply hands on with various AI tooling and transformed my own workflow and processes to leverage them, and having seen the remarkable uplift in output I am now capable of, my urgent message to you is this: it is a strategic imperative to understand what is coming, not by reading about it, but by experiencing it.

Hands On Experience Leads to Strategic Insight

I really believe the best way to understand the significant impact and opportunity of AI is to get hands on and build your own insights and understanding through experience. It's one thing to hear about a magic trick. It's a completely different experience to see one.

However...and maybe you can relate to this...more than one of my colleagues has talked about being too busy to dig in and learn more...don't fall into that trap. There's no room for complacency.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a wide-eyed optimist for how great AI is. There's proper challenges to deal with. Leadership in this era requires moving from the passenger seat to the driver's seat. You cannot effectively lead this transformation from the sidelines.