AI makes it possible to produce high-quality work at accelerated speeds. The change now confronting leaders is simple: execution speed will be less of a bottleneck, so decision-making speed and quality across the organization will be at a premium.
The truth is we’re often risk averse in hiring and promotion decisions, and the cost of that risk aversion will be magnified in an AI-driven world. Hiring the wrong people will result in poor decisions scaling faster, and organizations freezing under option overload.
Early in my career, in very structured roles on M&A teams, I was given problems that others had defined. The job was to execute accurately and put in long hours.
But when I moved to a startup environment as a “business generalist” that framework broke down immediately. There were no playbooks. No one to ask. Every day surfaced problems we’d never seen before, with real consequences attached to getting them wrong.
What suddenly mattered wasn’t just how hard anyone worked. It was:
The growth of AI in our businesses now puts a premium on these skills across the organization.
AI can dramatically compress execution time. Research, synthesis, first drafts, scenario exploration - all of it is faster and cheaper. We’ve seen this over the last several years at iSeatz.
But this creates a second-order effect that’s easy to miss: informed and sophisticated judgment is required more often and much earlier in the process. Leaders must choose paths, kill alternatives, and commit quickly. And they need people on their teams that can do the same. All decisions cannot move upstream. If they do, leaders will become bottlenecks, wasting AI leverage.
AI makes it easy to move fast. It also makes it easy to move fast in the wrong direction. Making more bad decisions more quickly is a recipe for disaster.
In this environment, the most valuable skill is discernment: the ability to ask the right questions, decide what matters, make choices, and communicate those choices and resulting action plans clearly.
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously distinguished between simplicity on this side of complexity and simplicity on the far side of complexity. Humans still own the hard work of getting to that simplicity on the far side of complexity.
In an AI world, that’s the most important job for people all across organizations.
Despite this shift, many organizations still hire and promote as if execution were the scarce resource. We overweight narrow experience and underweight learning velocity, curiosity, and judgment under pressure.
I learned this lesson painfully early in my career. We once hired a salesperson with deep experience in a specific industry we had entered.
Then the world changed - abruptly. Market conditions collapsed, and that industry froze. The person couldn’t adapt, couldn’t sell into adjacent markets, and had no interest in learning how.
The issue wasn’t competence or experience. It was rigidity and the lack of a growth mindset. I’d hired the wrong person.
Stop treating experience as a proxy for adaptability and defaulting to defensible hires
This isn’t an argument against experience. Experience still matters. The mistake is treating it as a predictor rather than one of several important inputs.
In an AI-accelerated world, leaders should:
AI increases individual leverage - we’ve seen it at iSeatz. Leaders decide who gets it. That decision deserves more thought than a checklist.
For people early in their careers - especially those without obviously technical backgrounds - the mandate is clear: get serious about using AI.
Play with it. Push it. Learn its strengths and weaknesses. Use it to handle drudge work faster so you can spend more time on judgment-rich problems that accelerate learning.
As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang put it, you’re not going to lose your job to AI. You’re going to lose it to someone who knows how to use AI.
AI is not a substitute for thinking. It’s a force multiplier for those who already do.
The future belongs to leaders who hire and promote individuals who can excel in a world where judgment, not just execution, is Job #1.
AI dramatically increases leverage. One person can now influence strategy, decisions, and outcomes at a scale that used to require teams. Good judgment scales faster. But so does bad judgment.
The real leadership mandate becomes empowering people who will make the most of that leverage.
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