You have understood that AI is going to change the game. You may already use it yourself, quietly, maybe even off the books. But in your leadership team meetings, all you get is silence. Or worse, the eye roll. "We already did the digital transformation, thanks." "Not a priority this year." "We'll look at it once it's mature."
You are not alone. Most leadership teams have never actually sat down together and defined an AI strategy, even though many of the same leaders will tell you, in private, that AI is now a question of survival. The gap between the urgency people feel and the inaction on the table is enormous.
I have spent the last two years working with executive committees on exactly this. And what I see, almost every time, is that the problem is not technical. It is a matter of posture. AI gets presented as a topic of its own, when it is really a tool that slots into every decision the leadership team already makes.
Here is how I go about it, and what I actually see work.
Stop selling AI. Show it.
The first mistake is walking in with a slide deck. Charts on trends, billions invested, use cases from Google or Microsoft. Your CFO does not care. Neither does your head of HR. They want to know what changes for them, concretely, this week.
So do it the other way round. Take a real irritant from the leadership team. Something everyone knows and nobody enjoys. The meeting write-up, the quarterly report summary, the board prep. And handle it with AI, in an hour, on your own.
At the next meeting, you do not talk about AI. You put the result on the table. "I prepped the board summary in 40 minutes instead of three hours. Here is how." Now you have everyone's attention. Not because you talked about AI, but because you solved a problem everyone was living with.
Start with yourself, not with everyone else
The classic trap for a CEO who wants to launch AI: asking everyone else to get on with it while never touching it themselves. It does not fly. People trust their direct manager far more than they trust senior leadership, and that gap is wide. A leadership team watches the boss. If you do not use AI yourself, nobody will take you seriously when you call it strategic.
I tell every leader I coach the same thing. Before you deploy anything, spend two weeks using AI yourself. Your emails, your notes, your meeting prep. You will learn what it does well and what it does not. And above all, you will be able to talk about it in your own words, not a consultant's.
One CEO I work with started by dictating his meeting notes to AI and having them restructured in under five minutes. Three weeks in, his head of sales asked him, "How do you turn that around so fast?" That is where the conversation starts. Not in a presentation. In a corridor.
Find the ally, not the skeptic
You are not going to win over the whole leadership team at once. And that is fine. What matters is finding the person who is ready to try. Not necessarily the most technical one, but the one with a concrete problem and the energy to test something different.
Often it is the marketing lead, the finance director or the head of HR. Someone who spends hours compiling, summarising, formatting. You show them a tool, you save them two hours, and you have your first internal champion. The skeptic will only move once they see the others pull ahead. That is normal. Let them watch.
In one seven-person leadership team I worked with, we started with two volunteers. Six weeks later, the other five had asked to be trained. Not because anyone forced them, but because they could see the difference.
Build AI into the rituals you already have
The fatal mistake is creating a separate "AI committee". A parallel working group, with its own meetings, its own slides, and its own disconnect from reality. AI should not be one item on the agenda. It should be inside every item on the agenda.
In practice, when the CFO presents the forecast, they also show the scenarios they tested with AI. When HR runs the headcount review, they used AI to cross-reference skills and open roles. When the sales director prepares the account strategy, they leaned on a market analysis generated in twenty minutes.
None of that needs a budget, an extra tool, or a reorganisation. Just a new reflex, in the same meetings.
Three questions that unlock a leadership team
When I run a diagnostic with a leadership team, I ask three questions. They are enough to drop the masks.
The first: "Who here uses AI at least once a week in their actual work?" Usually one or two hands go up. Sometimes none. And yet everyone says it matters.
The second: "Which repetitive task eats the most of your time every month?" Now everyone has an answer. And more often than not, AI can cut that task in half.
The third: "If a competitor used AI to do in two days what takes you two weeks, what would you do?" The silence after that question is worth more than any presentation.
What it looks like after six months
I am not going to promise you a revolution. What I see is a steady build. The leadership teams that take this seriously go through three phases.
Month one is individual experimentation. Everyone tests on their own, on their own topics. That is normal and it is healthy.
Months two and three, practices start to spread. The CFO shows what they do, HR borrows from it, the marketing lead sharpens their monitoring. Meetings change pace because the prep is better.
By month six, AI is no longer a topic. It is a reflex. And the leadership team that was hesitating in January is now asking the opposite question: "Can we push this further?"
The real risk is doing nothing
I always end here. The risk is not using AI badly. It is not starting at all. The productivity upside from moving fast on AI is not marginal, it is an order of magnitude. While your leadership team debates, your competitors are learning. And in a year, the gap will be too wide to close in a single quarter.
BCG has shown that the companies that succeed with AI pursue fewer use cases than the rest, around 3.5 on average versus 6.1, yet get roughly 2.1 times the return. Focus beats breadth. You do not need a strategic plan, a Big Four consultant or a dedicated budget. You need to show one concrete result at the next leadership meeting. That is it. The rest comes after.
Frequently asked questions
How do you get your leadership team to back AI?
Do not start with a budget. Start with a result. Take a real irritant from your leadership team, solve it with AI in under an hour, and put the result on the table at the next meeting. Concrete results win people over. Slides do not.
Do you need a Chief AI Officer to get started?
No. A job title is not a practice. What you need is a leader who uses AI themselves and sets the example. The rest follows. If nobody on the leadership team actually uses it, a Chief AI Officer will not change that.
Which AI use case should a leadership team start with?
Start with whatever eats time and annoys everyone. Meeting notes, report summaries, board prep, competitive monitoring. These tasks are visible, repetitive, and the payoff is immediate.
How do you keep AI from staying a gadget on the leadership team?
Build it into the rituals you already have. AI should not be a separate topic, it should be a reflex in every decision. When the CFO builds the budget with AI and HR runs the headcount review with it, it stops being a gadget. It becomes a working tool.
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