AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: AI Success in Leadership

In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, Shawn Dorward challenges leaders to consider what measuring success looks like with AI implemented across the organization and notes the need for a mindset shift in leaders to understand that transformation starts at the leadership level, not just the frontlines of employees.

Key Takeaways

• Mindset shift: There needs to be a mindset shift around AI. Stop asking if AI is working and rather ask if leadership has changed. If you’re trying to make your organization better with AI, a critical reset needs to happen. We keep asking whether employees are changing because of AI, but maybe it’s time to ask whether leadership has changed too. “If we’re just looking out to our front line to find if this has been a change, we’re really missing the key mark here…Leadership starts the AI success journey, and the leadership reality is that most organizations measure AI progress through activity.”
• Measuring success: Leaders should know whether people are engaging with the technology. IT teams should be able to see that and measure that. However, this can also create a false sense of progress because while it tells you that people are using AI, it’s not necessarily telling you that the organization is operating differently because of it. The key question here: Is the operations of the organization any different because of AI? “Sometimes we’re not transforming. We think we are. We’re making old work faster, maybe a little easier, and faster doesn’t necessarily mean better. A bad meeting with great AI summary is still a bad meeting. It just has better notes. We have to change the way that we lead in this era.”
• Operational differentiator: You go from asking the question, “How much AI are we using?” to asking, “What are we now able to do differently?” While that sounds like a small change, it isn’t; it’s an operational differentiator. One question focuses on the activity and other focuses on how the business works. Further, if AI is making work more efficient and saving employees time, what does that look like across your organization? For instance, if the reward for becoming more efficient is simply receiving more work, they may become very quiet about how much time AI is saving them. Leadership has to decide what recovered capacity is even for.
• Addressing leaders: At your next leadership meeting, don’t start with the dashboard. Start with the question “What have you personally changed, as a leader, because AI is now available?” This is going to change the way that we think as leaders. If we can’t identify the way that we’re running the business differently with AI, we’re not really fully experiencing the benefit internally. Also ask “What changed about how you lead?” and “What part of our business still operates as though AI did not exist?” AI transformation cannot be something leaders ask employees to do while leadership still remains untouched. Leaders need to reset.
• Action items: Here are some quick things that you can do as leaders:
  • Identify one leadership behavior AI should change
  • Identify one process that still assumes information is scarce, slow, or difficult to interpret; ask whether that assumption is still true with the insertion of AI
  • Add one outcome measure besides your adoption measure