Same technology. Very different read on where it is heading.

I do not think this is a communications problem. I think it is a governance problem, and it is going to become an execution problem for every enterprise leader trying to get real value out of AI investments over the next 18 months.

This is the pattern I keep seeing. Not a technology problem, but an operations problem that nobody planned for because the agents shipped faster than the governance could keep up. I think this is the next real bottleneck for enterprise AI. Not model capability. Orchestration.

Agents are not chatbots

That scene plays out more often than most leaders want to admit. And it gets at something I think the industry is only starting to reckon with.

Global AI spending is projected to hit $665 billion this year. Nearly every leadership team has increased their AI budget. The CFO holdout population has collapsed from 70% to 4% in five years. The money is flowing. The conviction is real.

They have an operating model problem.

That is the part of this conversation that still gets skipped.

The Pilot Trap

Every enterprise I talk to has at least one AI agent running somewhere. A chatbot in Slack. A summarization tool on top of their document system. A "copilot" that autocompletes emails.

What followed was 45 minutes of well-intentioned conversation that covered everything from chatbots to autonomous agents to "what Google just announced." By the end, we had a whiteboard full of ideas and exactly zero clarity on what we were actually going to do. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone — and you're not failing. You're experiencing what I've started calling the AI Execution Gap.

The Gap Isn't Knowledge. It's Operationalization

A decade later, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents an unprecedented opportunity to amplify this idea-driven approach. The recent Harvard Business Review article The Secret to Successful AI-Driven Process Redesign highlights that the most successful AI transformations occur when business transformation is democratized—when all employees, not just a select few, are empowered to leverage AI in their daily work.

This updated approach—Building an AI-Driven Idea Workforce—integrates these two philosophies. The fusion of AI with an idea-driven culture doesn't just enhance efficiency; it accelerates innovation, democratizes decision-making, and fosters a more engaged and forward-thinking workforce. Organizations that implement this successfully will be those that rethink their approach to AI adoption, ensuring it enhances employees' ability to generate, test, and implement ideas at scale.

1. Put the People You Care About First

One of the biggest truths I learned from my Dad is that leadership starts with a genuine love and respect for the people you serve. If you were part of his team—even if it was just for a season—he treated you like family. I can't begin to count how many times I've heard stories about him organizing big meals, cookouts, or gatherings after a long day's work, just to say "thank you" in a way that went beyond simply handing out a paycheck. He believed that hard work should be recognized, and he made sure his appreciation was real, tangible, and felt by everyone.

Diocletian's Tetrarchy, established in 293 AD, wasn't simply about delegation. It was a radical restructuring of power. He appointed a co-emperor (Augustus), and each Augustus chose a junior emperor (Caesar) to assist and eventually succeed them. This created a clear hierarchy and a mechanism for orderly succession, aimed at preventing the power struggles that had plagued the empire. While not without its flaws (it ultimately dissolved into civil war after Diocletian's retirement), the Tetrarchy brought a period of stability and allowed the Roman Empire to survive for another two centuries in the West and over a thousand in the East. It serves as a fascinating, if extreme, historical example of how dividing power can, under the right circumstances, lead to greater stability.

Delegation: The Modern Tetrarchy

What are Self-Correcting Mechanisms?

Think of a thermostat. It constantly monitors the temperature and automatically adjusts the heating or cooling system to maintain a desired set point. This is a simple example of a self-correcting mechanism — a feedback loop that allows a system to monitor its performance, identify deviations from a desired state, and take corrective action. At work, self-correcting mechanisms are processes, practices, and cultural norms that enable an organization to continuously learn, adapt, and improve. They are the feedback loops that allow us to identify what's working, what's not, and adjust our course accordingly. They are not about achieving perfection, but rather about embracing a process of continuous refinement.

This is where Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to the AI Age provides a much-needed dose of perspective. While not solely focused on AI, Harari's exploration of information networks throughout history offers a powerful framework for understanding the current GenAI frenzy and navigating it with a more discerning eye.

Harari reminds us that every major technological advancement has been accompanied by both excitement and anxiety. The printing press, the telegraph, the internet — each of these innovations promised to revolutionize society, and each also sparked fears about its potential downsides. GenAI is no different. Its ability to generate text, images, code, and other forms of content is truly remarkable, but it also raises legitimate concerns about job displacement, misinformation, and the very nature of creativity and truth.

Understanding Generative AI

At its core, generative AI refers to a subset of artificial intelligence models that can create novel content. Instead of merely analyzing existing data, these models learn the underlying patterns and structures of text, images, code, and more. When given a prompt or instruction, generative AI can produce new content that mimics the style and characteristics of the training data.

There are five main areas where healthcare organizations can target AI to transform the care delivery experience:

1. Improved Diagnosis and Treatment

From my experience, there are five main areas where courage plays a substantive role in the success or failure of leaders:

The Ability to Make Bold and Innovative Decisions

Jared: What is the difference between a leader and a manager?

My Prompt: Write a blog post on how leaders in large enterprises can leverage artificial intelligence to inspire their employees.

ChatGPT's Response:

While I would love to say that I left that meeting to a standing ovation, with everyone sharing in the same lightbulb moment I had while I was in the elevator an hour earlier, nothing could be further from the truth. If there is one certainty I have come to expect over the past 15 years it is that no one likes being told no, regardless of how you spin it. That said, it is almost equally as true that people tend to be fair and reasonable as long as you can honestly explain why something isn't possible, what that means, how it impacts them, and ultimately how they can help. The last thing I ever want to do after delivering a piece of bad news is leave people with that lingering sense of defeat. Instead, I have found that bringing them onboard to support the initiatives that must take priority at the moment not only enriches those projects, but helps you build a coalition that will ensure the future success of the organization's strategic goals.

As a leader, saying no is one of the most challenging things about the job. As Peter Drucker said, "There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation." Very few people cherish conflict, but just as healthy conflict can breed better decisions, so can new partnerships be forged in having those difficult conversations around competing objectives. Just as no tree has branches foolish as to fight among themselves, no organization can succeed when healthy conflict breeds enemies opposed to partners.

To those who have visited London before, the hustle and bustle that is a hallmark of this incredible city have been replaced with an eerie stillness that reverberates into a deafening silence when standing in typically busy places like Piccadilly Circus or London Bridge. While the crowds are gone, so are the personal interactions that we take for granted on a daily basis with friends and family, colleagues, and acquaintances alike. Over the past year countless holidays, birthdays, and special occasions have been spent apart due to restrictions limiting travel and people interacting outside of their bubbles. From a work perspective, hundreds of thousands of people have had to learn how to work almost full time from home, some businesses have been forced to shut down with the potential of never reopening, and those who remain open are faced with the task of defining a new strategy to survive the digital tsunami that has become the staple of a Post-Pandemic economy. All of this however, pales in comparison to the 120K people who have lost their lives to COVID-19 in the United Kingdom since the pandemic began.

It's with this backdrop I have been reminded multiple times of a valuable lesson over the past year. Life can sometimes be overwhelming, work can sometimes be overwhelming, and that can sometimes be really hard to deal with. And that's OK. I have learned to value the vulnerability in the conversations I have with my colleagues and team members above anything else. It's not just the shared understanding and acknowledgement of our current circumstances, but it's an openness and desire to share their stories and in turn hear yours that has been eye opening. It's eye opening because there is a school of thought that vulnerability is a weakness, especially in leaders, but to those who subscribe to that ideology I can only hope you have the opportunity to experience just how powerful it can be to share your story with someone else. Not only do you build a solid foundation of trust, but you build strong working relationships that so often yield unstoppable teams.

I will be the first to admit that after reading and reflecting on Mays' article in The Atlantic, I couldn't help but think the core message around the way we communicate as a society resonates just as clearly today as it did in 1960. In fact, it's terrifying to think that 61 years after this article was written, in a time where people have more mechanisms to communicate with one another and with a broader reach than at any point previously in human history, we are still falling into the same traps. While a lot is being said every single day, how much of it is built on truth and integrity? How much of it is built upon a foundation of mutual respect?

While this topic echoes across both our personal and professional lives, let's take a moment to focus on how we communicate in the work place. In my blog post introducing Genuine Communication, I focused on the idea that communication has to have meaning to both the sender and the receiver in order to have value. But let's break that down one step further. What gives a message meaning? We only have to go as far as the wise words of Benjamin E. Mays to know that honest, meaningful communication needs three ingredients:

That's the biggest lesson in Genuine Communication, you must mean it. It's being intentional in the way you communicate, meaning what you say, and taking the time to make it count. I know what you're thinking, "That sounds great, but who has time for that?" While that's a valid point, it's also an opportunity to consider the messages you're sending out to people and whether you should really send them in the first place. Instead of making your communications a volume business, you should instead look to add more value into the equation. In doing so, not only will the people you're communicating with see and feel a difference, but so will you.

As an example, a few years ago I received a message from a senior leader thanking me for the work I had done to deliver a large, multi-year project. At first, I was really taken aback by the fact he had taken the time to write to me to acknowledge my contribution. Unfortunately, all that positive sentiment quickly faded as I read the message. My first reaction was the message looked as if it had been written by a corporate communications team, not a person. There was no doubt in my mind that the same message was copied, pasted, and sent via an Executive Admin to anyone that was involved. In that moment, I wasn't being acknowledged for my contribution, I was an anonymous checkbox looking for a checkmark. What started out as such a wonderful opportunity to make a lasting impact was quickly wiped away because the sender forgot that people aren't checkboxes and messages need meaning to add value.

Reflecting on these moments now, I see a pattern of behaviors that I can only describe as Genuine Leadership. Examples of courage in the face of adversity, building meaningful connections in a world where superficial interaction is the norm, leveraging principal to drive authenticity not adversity, and staggering strength through vulnerability as a means to unify not divide. It is through these examples of Genuine Leadership that I have aspired to model my own leadership style, failing and succeeding in equal measure over the years to live up to these ideals. It is in that journey of constant self-evaluation that you truly gain the most insight into the lesson behind each of those moments and what is truly required for you to become a Genuine Leader.

Over the next several months I will be sharing one of these examples with you each week, as well as my thoughts and experiences as I have tried to put it into practice over the years. In doing so, I aim to share the moments of true leadership that have inspired me to become a better, more genuine leader each and every day. I hope you will share your feedback on the series, as well as your own experiences in practicing these behaviors.