Briefing #34: The End of the Beginning
Your journey to becoming an "AI-native" organization starts here.
Note: This briefing was originally published on LinkedIn on March 20, 2026. 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 is a ghost that haunts every boardroom and every strategic offsite: the ghost of initiatives past. It’s the collection of ambitious plans and three-ring binders that were launched with fanfare, only to be silently archived months later, leaving the business entirely unchanged. We’ve spent decades perfecting the art of the pilot project and the “skunkworks” team, yet an astonishing number of these efforts still today fail to create lasting value.
As we stand at the precipice of the AI era, we, as leaders, are at risk of repeating the same mistake on a more expensive and accelerated scale. We can feel the pressure to “do something” about AI, but the path forward often seems like a dense, impenetrable fog.
If there’s anything to take away from the briefings I’ve shared with you over the past several months, it’s that the only way out is through. The companies who will win in today’s AI climate aren’t going to be the ones with the most visionary, long-range plan. They won’t be the ones with the best AI models, or even the most compelling AI-powered use case.
Those organizations that succeed will be the ones who have mastered the art of the sprint. The ones who build a high “organizational metabolism” that lets them consistently turn small, focused wins into compounding institutional knowledge.
They understand that the aim of any transformation effort goes beyond the launch of a perfect AI system, but the development of an internal engine for change that endures long past any particular transformation initiative.
This is what I mean when I say this is “the end of the beginning.” The work to mastering AI isn’t about learning to “do AI.” It’s about learning to think like an AI-native leader – to see your business not as a collection of static processes to be optimized, but as a dynamic system of capabilities waiting to be re-imagined, augmented by AI.
It might seem like the path forward to helping your business become AI-native is mythical and mystical. I’d suggest something totally different: it’s no mystery. It’s a discipline:
Diagnose your most critical business challenges
Build human-centric systems that address them
And codify your success so the entire organization gets smarter.
Then, do it again. That transformation flywheel you’re creating – watch where it takes you when it begins to turn.