Over the past month, I have asked a simple question to nearly every senior leader I coach: “How are you using AI?”
I expected a range of responses. Some leaders work in organizations that have invested heavily in AI, while others are in companies that are still trying to determine how it fits into their strategy, operations, and culture. What surprised me was not the variation in adoption. It was how many highly accomplished executives had not engaged with it at all.
These were not leaders who had experimented with AI and decided it lacked value. Many had yet to seriously engage with it, despite recognizing that it was reshaping the landscape around them. Others had convinced themselves that waiting was the prudent choice. They wanted more clarity. More certainty. More time to see how things evolved before investing energy into learning something that felt unfamiliar and potentially disruptive.
At first glance, this appears to be a technology issue.
I do not believe it is.
What I see has far less to do with artificial intelligence than it does with a challenge that has confronted leaders throughout every period of significant change: how people respond when the environment shifts and the capabilities that once made them successful no longer feel sufficient. AI simply happens to be the latest catalyst exposing that reality.
For many leaders, this moment is revealing something deeper than a lack of technical knowledge. It is exposing how they relate to uncertainty, discomfort, learning, relevance, and change itself. Those dynamics have always influenced leadership effectiveness. AI is simply making them impossible to ignore.
My Own Resistance to Technology
If I am being honest, I have never been particularly drawn to technology.
Throughout most of my career, my interests have centered on people, leadership, transformation, and what helps individuals create meaningful and lasting change. New platforms, software, and emerging technologies rarely captured my attention. In fact, there have only been two periods in my professional life when technology genuinely excited me.
The first was during the development of our coaching app fourteen years ago. At the time, I was becoming increasingly frustrated by a challenge familiar to most coaches. Clients would leave sessions with powerful insights and genuine commitment, but life would quickly get in the way. They would forget assignments, lose momentum, and struggle to consistently apply what they had learned between sessions.
When mobile applications emerged, I immediately recognized the opportunity. Not because I was fascinated by the technology itself, but because I understood what it could do for human development. It could reinforce learning, create accountability, and support behavioral change between coaching conversations. For the first time, technology felt like a meaningful partner in the transformation process rather than simply another tool.
Then I largely lost interest again… until AI.
The first prompt I entered into ChatGPT was not work-related. I asked it to create a stage play featuring Albert Einstein, Jesus Christ, and my mentor Fernando Flores sitting around a dinner table having a philosophical conversation. The result was thoughtful, creative, entertaining, and surprisingly sophisticated. More importantly, it sparked something I had not expected: curiosity.
I suddenly saw possibilities.
Not because AI had all the answers, but because it functioned differently than any technology I had encountered before. It became a thought partner. It helped me explore ideas, challenge assumptions, test perspectives, accelerate research, and expand my thinking. The experience reminded me that curiosity often arrives before understanding. We do not always need to know exactly where something is leading before we begin engaging with it.
The Real Risk Is Not AI
Much of the public conversation about AI focuses on whether jobs will disappear, industries will be disrupted, or entire functions will be automated. Those concerns are understandable, but they are not what concerns me most.
What concerns me is how leaders are responding.
Recent research has found that organizations are already experiencing significant productivity gains from AI, yet many managers are struggling to keep pace with what those gains actually mean for leadership. Teams can generate more ideas, produce more content, analyze more information, and execute more quickly than ever before. As a result, leaders are increasingly finding themselves responsible for managing a level of speed and complexity they were never trained to handle. This is creating a new leadership challenge that extends far beyond technology itself.
At the same time, research examining how people are actually using AI reveals that its adoption is no longer limited to technical specialists. Professionals across industries are integrating AI into communication, research, planning, analysis, decision-making, and problem-solving. In other words, AI is becoming embedded in the daily workflow of knowledge workers rather than existing as a niche capability reserved for a select few.
Whether leaders choose to participate or not does not change this reality:
- The workplace is changing.
- The expectations placed upon leaders are changing.
- The skills required to remain relevant are changing.
The question is not whether those changes will continue. The question is whether leaders are willing to continue evolving alongside them.
The Psychology of Falling Behind
When I speak with executives who have avoided AI, I do not hear compelling strategic arguments. I hear anxiety.
Some worry about looking uninformed. Others feel overwhelmed by the pace of innovation and the number of platforms entering the market. A few convinced themselves that waiting would be the smarter approach because eventually the field would narrow and the “right” tools would become obvious.
All these reactions are understandable. They are also remarkably common whenever people encounter meaningful disruption.
One of the greatest misconceptions about change is the belief that certainty will arrive before action becomes necessary. Most of the time, the opposite is true. The individuals who adapt most effectively are rarely those who possess the most certainty. They are the ones willing to learn while uncertainty still exists.
What often appears to be strategic patience is actually avoidance.
The longer leaders postpone engaging with change, the steeper the learning curve becomes. Mild discomfort gradually turns into overwhelm. Overwhelm eventually becomes disengagement. By the time many people decide they need to catch up, they are no longer learning alongside the curve. They are chasing it.
This is precisely why AI is exposing something important about leadership. The issue is not whether someone understands a particular platform. The issue is whether they possess the mindset required to continuously adapt as the environment evolves.
What Leaders Need to Build Now
One of the great ironies of the AI conversation is that the capabilities that will matter most in the future are not primarily technological. The leaders who remain relevant over the next decade will certainly need to understand how AI works and where it can create value, but technical proficiency alone will not be enough. What will distinguish successful leaders is their ability to continuously adapt, learn, and make sound decisions in an environment where change is occurring faster than most organizations have ever experienced.
Emotional intelligence will become increasingly important, not less. As technology takes on more routine and analytical tasks, leadership will continue to depend on trust, influence, empathy, communication, and the ability to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics. Organizations still need people who can align teams, manage conflict, inspire performance, and build commitment around a shared vision. Those capabilities remain deeply human and difficult to automate.
The same is true of mind mastery. Many of the leaders I encounter are wrestling with some version of the same internal conversation: Am I falling behind? Can I keep up? What happens if I become less relevant? These concerns are understandable, but they can quickly lead to avoidance, procrastination, and disengagement if they are not managed effectively. The ability to regulate anxiety, challenge limiting beliefs, and remain resilient in the face of uncertainty is becoming a strategic advantage.
Perhaps the most important shift involves our relationship with learning itself. For much of the modern workplace, expertise created security. Today, expertise still matters, but the half-life of knowledge continues to shrink. Leaders who thrive will be those who cultivate curiosity and develop an appetite for continuous learning. They will not view learning as something that happens periodically through formal training. Instead, they will see it as an ongoing responsibility woven into how they lead and grow.
Related: Why Continuous Learning is Now a Career Survival Skill
That commitment to growth must be paired with mastery. In a culture that increasingly rewards speed, there is a temptation to skim the surface of many things without developing depth in any of them. Yet organizations continue to place tremendous value on people who combine adaptability with excellence. One of the books that has influenced my thinking for more than three decades is Mastery by George Leonard. I first read it when it was published in 1991, and its message feels every bit as relevant today as it did then. Leonard argued that lasting success comes not from chasing quick results, but from developing a deep appreciation for the learning process itself. Mastery requires discipline, focus, and a willingness to stay engaged through periods of discomfort, repetition, and incremental progress. Those qualities are unlikely to become less valuable in an AI-enabled workplace.
Finally, there is critical thinking. If AI changes anything, it may be the premium placed on sound judgment. Leaders now have access to more information, more analysis, and more generated content than ever before. The challenge is no longer obtaining information. The challenge is knowing what to do with it. Strong leaders will still need to ask thoughtful questions, evaluate competing perspectives, challenge assumptions, and make decisions in situations where the answers are not obvious. AI can support those processes, but it cannot replace them.
The New Leadership Imperative
The executives I spoke with are not unintelligent. They are not incapable of learning. They are not resistant because they lack ambition. They are experiencing something every leader encounters at various points in a career: the discomfort of stepping into unfamiliar territory without knowing exactly how it will unfold.
The challenge is that today’s environment offers very little reward for waiting. The pace of change is accelerating, and the leaders who remain relevant will not necessarily be those who predict every technological shift correctly. They will be the ones who remain curious enough to engage with change before they fully understand it, resilient enough to tolerate the discomfort that accompanies learning, and disciplined enough to continue growing when it would be easier to retreat into what already feels familiar.
The best time to begin learning about AI may have been two years ago. The next best time is today. Not because everyone needs to become an AI expert, and not because every tool available today will survive. Rather, it is because relevance has always belonged to those who continue developing themselves while the future is still unfolding. The leaders who thrive in the years ahead will not be the ones who waited for certainty to arrive. They will be the ones who remained engaged, adaptable, and willing to learn while the world around them continued to change.
The future of leadership will not be determined by who adopts every new technology first. It will be shaped by those who remain adaptable, curious, and committed to growth as the world around them evolves.
Executive coaching helps leaders strengthen the mindset, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, and resilience needed to navigate change with confidence.