Briefing #19: AI is What We Make of It
How your POV on AI determines your strategy
Note: This briefing was originally published on LinkedIn on November 28, 2025. It has been migrated to our new home on Substack to create a complete archive. Multi-format features like video and audio commentary are available for all new briefings published from April 2026 onwards.
There’s a philosophical debate raging right now, sparked by articles like one I recently read in the New Yorker: Is AI really thinking, or is it just a cleverly complex mimic?
It’s a captivating question. For those of us leading a business, maybe the real question isn’t “What is AI?” but “What do we believe it is?”
How your organization answers this question or, more likely, how it avoids answering it could define your entire approach to AI. Over the past year, I’ve observed that the business world has fractured into at least three distinct camps, each defined by its own implicit point of view on what AI’s role in business is:
1. The Status-Quo Champions: These are leaders who claim to champion AI but are really only interested in maintaining the status quo. They use AI as “innovation theater.” They’ll fund a small, contained chatbot pilot that goes nowhere. For this group, AI isn’t a tool. It’s a topic for a press release. Their unstated belief is that AI is a mild force, one that can be managed and contained within an existing way of working, broken processes and all.
2. The Exploiters: These are the people seeking to exploit AI because they think it’s a path to a quick dollar. They see AI as a crude automation tool, a way to cut costs and replace headcount. They aren’t interested in transformation, only in extraction. Their unstated belief is that AI is a blunt instrument, and they’re all too happy to wield it, often damaging customer trust and employee morale in the process.
3. The AGI Worshippers: These are the people waiting for divine inspiration. They believe AI’s true homecoming will arrive with the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Until that day of rapture, they argue, it’s all just “wait and see.” Their unstated belief is that AI is a spectator sport. They are paralyzed, waiting for a future event rather than acting in the present.
The one thing all three camps have in common? They’re all, in their own way, passively waiting to be told what AI is. They’re letting the hype, the fear, or inertia dictate their strategy.
This is a failure of leadership. To paraphrase Cisco’s John Chambers: “Disruption waits for no one.” While it may feel prudent to wait and see how things play out, leaders must be asking these questions now, not later in response to a disruption that’s already taken place.
So, what’s the alternative?
The alternative is to decide. The best leaders aren’t waiting to be told what AI is. They’re actively deciding what role AI will play in their organization and building a strategy to match.
Here are three things you can do today to position AI effectively in your organization and evergreen your business for the disruptions we don’t even know about yet:
Open Your Eyes: Encourage experimentation. Assume the next disruption could happen tomorrow. The goal isn’t to find a single, perfect use case. The goal is to build your team’s “AI fluency.” Give them the permission and the safety to explore, to test, and to fail small so they can learn fast.
Tune Off the Hype: Come to your own conclusions. Ground your strategy in the reality of where your organization is today and what ultimate value it could be creating. The market-at-large doesn’t know your business, your customers, or your team. Stop listening to the hype that tells you what AI “should” be, and start defining what it will be for you and your organization.
Be the Disruptor: Don’t wait for change to come so you can react to it. Take the initiative and forge the path that lets your organization be the disruption, rather than the one being disrupted. Identify your own most valuable, complex process and ask, “What if we were the ones to make this obsolete?”
We started this article by asking what AI really is. Here’s the bottom line: AI is what we make of it.
We can either be told by others what AI is, or we can, as leaders, decide. The choice is ours.