How leadership decisions, not AI tools, are shaping which organizations move forward and which ones don’t
Recently, Ethan Mollick, Wharton professor and the author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, wrote:
“It is amazing how many companies I talk to still have AI effectively blocked by IT and legal departments for out-of-date reasons.”
I am seeing the same thing with the businesses I work with.
It just doesn’t always show up as IT or legal.
More often, it looks like uncertainty.
Or hesitation.
Or not knowing where to start.
Even when working with businesses in the same industry, facing similar pressures, their relationship with AI can look completely different.
Over the last three years, I’ve noticed that most fall into two buckets when it comes to how they approach AI.
The “start small” approach
In the first bucket, I see leaders who are making a safe space for their teams to actively learn about AI in their day-to-day work. These leaders are running small experiments with their teams and refining policies as they go. As a result, their teams are already becoming more efficient in tasks like summarizing research, drafting reports, organizing information and reimagining how work gets done.
The “wait and see” approach
In the second bucket, AI is still being debated by the leadership team. As a result, team members are often unsure whether they are allowed to use AI, or for what use cases. Questions about privacy and security keep resurfacing, but no clear decisions are being made. These organizations are waiting for clear (sometimes perfect) answers before moving forward.
The ironic part is that many employees in the second bucket are already experimenting with AI. They are just doing it without the guidance or supervision of their leaders, and often using personal AI tools that carry lower security protections and more risk.
This divide reveals something important.
The real challenge of AI adoption is not the technology.
It is leadership.
The data confirms what many leaders already feel
According to McKinsey’s State of AI research, about 88% of organizations report using AI in at least one business function. Yet only around one-third have successfully scaled AI across their organization.
In other words. AI is spreading quickly. But many organizations are still figuring out how to use it well.
Meanwhile, the Stanford AI Index Report shows that global AI investment and enterprise adoption are accelerating. This puts leaders in a difficult position. The pace of change is increasing, but the questions that matter most, around governance, trust, and responsible use, still don’t have simple answers.
Taken together, the message is clear.
Access to AI is no longer the barrier.
Knowing how to introduce it responsibly is.
The real divide: learning vs waiting
Across the organizations I work with, two patterns keep surfacing.
Some organizations treat AI as something to learn from. Others wait for certainty before taking any action.
Learning-focused organizations
These organizations approach AI thoughtfully but proactively.
They set simple guardrails. Then they create space for their teams to try things.
Their approach usually includes:
- setting clear boundaries around what is safe to use AI for and what is not
- selecting a few approved tools
- providing basic gen AI training
- running quick team check-ins to surface questions, concerns, and ideas
- adjusting policies as they learn
Leaders in these organizations are not moving recklessly. They are learning alongside their teams, building shared language around what “good AI use” looks like, and making it safe for people to ask questions without fear of judgment.
They simply understand that learning requires trying.
Hesitant organizations
Other organizations take a more cautious path.
Legitimate concerns about security, privacy, or accuracy lead to long internal discussions. Leaders often want perfect clarity before allowing experimentation. As I am often told by leaders, “I just don’t know what I don’t know.”
Inside these organizations, the signs are often similar.
- There is no shared definition of what responsible AI use looks like.
- Conversations about AI feel premature or politically charged.
- Different departments, such as IT, HR, legal, and operations, have different perspectives but no shared direction.
- Some teams are using AI regularly while others are unsure whether they are allowed to.
- And leaders feel pressure to do something but are not sure where to start.
The intention to fully grasp the situation before taking action is understandable. Leaders want to protect their organizations.
But when experimentation is restricted, learning is restricted too. And in many cases, employees start finding their own workarounds.
The hidden risk: shadow AI
When organizations restrict AI use without offering clear alternatives, employees do not stop using it. They just stop talking about it.
They turn to personal AI accounts without guidance, training, or oversight from leadership.
This is shadow AI. And ironically, the organizations trying hardest to avoid AI risk are often the ones creating the most.
A common mistake leaders make when accessing AI risk
One reason many organizations remain cautious is concern about how AI tools handle data.
Early in the development of generative AI, these concerns were valid. Leaders worried that information entered into AI systems might automatically train the model.
But enterprise AI platforms have evolved quickly.
Many modern enterprise tools now include protections such as:
- contractual privacy safeguards
- administrative controls and audit logs
- isolated environments for customer data
- security certifications
- policies preventing enterprise data from being used for training
However, many internal policies are still based on early assumptions about AI.
That creates the situation Ethan Mollick described.
Two organizations in the same industry can have completely different perceptions of risk.
What is actually holding leaders back
By this point, many leaders already have a sense of what they should be doing. Set some guardrails, let the team try a few things, and provide some training.
So why aren’t more organizations doing it?
In my experience, it usually comes down to three things.
The fear of getting it wrong
Many leaders feel that if they give their teams permission to use AI, they are also accepting responsibility for anything that goes wrong.
But as we have seen, doing nothing does not stop AI use. It just removes leadership from the conversation.
The lack of shared language
In many organizations, leadership teams have not agreed on what “responsible AI use” actually looks like. IT sees it as a security issue. HR sees it as a training issue. Legal sees it as a liability issue.
Without shared language across the leadership team, no one feels confident making the first move.
The belief that they need to know more before they start
This is the one I hear the most. Leaders feel they need to “know” AI before they can guide their teams. But waiting for detailed knowledge in a space that changes every week is a strategy that never resolves.
The leaders making progress are not the ones who understood everything about AI first. They are the ones who created conditions for their teams to learn together and built in the proper safe guards.
The cost of waiting
The organizations that start learning early gain something more valuable than productivity.
They build capability.
And capability compounds over time.
The organizations that delay will eventually adopt the same tools, but they will be starting from scratch while others have already built the foundation.
If this sounds like a conversation your leadership team needs to have …
If your organization is stuck between knowing AI matters and not knowing where to start, you are not alone. That gap between awareness and action is exactly where we work.
The AI Readiness Accelerator is a 6-week program where we work with leadership teams to build the clarity, guardrails, and shared direction they need to move forward with AI confidently and responsibly.
If you want to find out whether it is the right fit for your leadership team, book a complimentary 20-minute clarity call. We will talk through what is happening inside your organization and where the biggest opportunities are.
