What Business Leaders Need to Know About AI That No One Is Telling Them
3-minute read
Most conversations about AI for leaders are about the technology or the organization. This one is about you.
What It Actually Is
Most leaders use Generative AI like a search engine or an employee. It is neither. It is closer to a very fast, very fluent thinking partner that has no judgment about what matters, no stake in the outcome, and no way of knowing when it is wrong. Treat it accordingly.
The Input Problem
Most people underinvest in the input and overestimate the output. Vague questions produce fluent-sounding vagueness. The leaders who get the most from AI are the ones who can articulate precisely what they need and push back when something feels off. Good output requires good input. That has always been true of the best tools. AI did not change it. AI just made the gap more visible, faster.
What It Does to Expertise
The value of knowing things is declining. The value of knowing what to do with things, how to frame a problem, what questions to ask, how to evaluate an answer, is increasing. If your authority has been built on being the person in the room who knows the most, that foundation is shifting. The leaders who do well here are the ones who move their value into judgment. That is harder than it sounds, and most conversations about AI never get there.
What It Reveals
When you start using AI well, you notice how much of what felt like insight was pattern matching on familiar information. AI does that faster and across more data than any human could. What it cannot do is exercise genuine judgment in a situation it has never seen, read a room, or recognize when the question itself is wrong. Those are the things worth protecting. But you must be honest about which parts of your thinking were genuinely that, and which were something AI can now do faster.
You Have to Use It to Get Good at It
You develop a feel for where to trust AI and where to verify it only by testing it yourself, on real problems, with real stakes. Not from a briefing. Not from a series of blog posts, including this one. That is the part no vendor will tell you, because there is nothing to sell. The leaders who will do this well are not waiting for their organization to hand them a policy. They are already in the tools, learning what they can and cannot do, building the instincts that no amount of reading produces.
None of this requires becoming a technologist. It requires what good leadership has always required: staying close to what is happening and being willing to act on what you find.
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