Everyone Is Running Fast. The Jury Is Still Out.

3-minute read

A former client said something recently that I have not stopped thinking about.

Everyone is playing chicken right now. They are running fast, spending big, and betting that someone will figure out how to make money from this. Nobody knows if they will.

This was shared by someone who has built and sold companies, reads everything, and has spent the last two years going deep on AI. His verdict is that the technology is real, but the business models are not yet proven. The gap between those two facts is where a lot of bad decisions get made.

Most leaders, faced with that uncertainty, default to one of two responses. Both are wrong.

Two Failure Modes to Avoid

The first is paralysis. Waiting for the landscape to settle, for the right use case to become obvious, or for someone else to go first and test it out. The landscape is not going to settle on a timeline that is useful to you. The organizations pulling ahead are integrating AI into real workflows now, learning what works, and building operational capability that compounds. Waiting is not caution. It is falling behind.

The second is uncritical acceleration. Adopting every tool, chasing every announcement, or treating board pressure and competitor headlines as a strategy. AI headlines consistently overstate short-term impact while underestimating long-term transformation. Most breathless announcements will not matter. A smaller number will matter enormously. The organizations that will pay the highest price are those that cannot tell the difference.

What Is Real

The capabilities are genuine. Generative AI is doing things that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Most AI products are built on top of one of three large language models: Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini) or OpenAI (ChatGPT). A handful of others, including Meta and Mistral, are in the mix but have fallen further behind in recent months. The models are powerful. Who will capture the value they create is very much an open question.

The leaders who navigate this well are not the ones with the most certainty. They are the ones who can act decisively while holding their conclusions loosely.

The Path Between the Two

Most leaders respond to AI uncertainty by either waiting for more information or delegating the question to their technology team. Both are abdications. The path between paralysis and uncritical acceleration is not a compromise. It is a posture. Use the tools yourself so you understand them viscerally, focus on specific problems with measurable outcomes rather than broad initiatives, and build the judgment to distinguish signal from noise. That last one is the hardest and the most valuable. It comes from firsthand experience, from talking to peers who are implementing rather than vendors who are selling, and from staying connected to ground truth, such as your customers, your frontline people, and the specific problems you are genuinely trying to solve.

The Bottom Line

AI is a tool, not a strategy. The leaders who succeed are those who stay focused on outcomes, invest in the human transformation alongside the technical one, and maintain the humility to keep learning as the technology evolves. The leaders who struggle are those waiting for certainty before acting, those who delegate AI entirely to technologists without strategic oversight, and those who underestimate how much organizational change is required to capture the value.

The strategy still must come from you.

About the Author

Dr. Melissa Fristrom

Founder, Core Allies, LLC

Melissa Fristrom is the founder of Core Allies, LLC an executive coaching and advisory firm that works with C-suite leaders navigating inflection points. She advises senior leaders on strategy, organizational change, and the human side of technology adoption. Before founding Core Allies, she held senior leadership roles in frontline positions up to CEO. She is based in Boston.

The artwork in this post is from fristrom.art. Melissa works in encaustic, pigmented wax layered to explore how color carries emotion, perception, and meaning. It is a practice that runs parallel to the questions this series is asking about leadership: looking more carefully at what is actually in front of you, rather than what you expect to see.

If any of this landed, useful or uncomfortable, that's worth paying attention to. I work with leaders and their teams on exactly these questions. I'd love to connect.

mfristrom@coreallies.com · (617) 444-9809 · coreallies.com