The 10-Minute AI Leadership Habit That Compounds Organizational Learning
Most AI transformation initiatives die the same death.
A senior leader gets inspired, launches a committee, assigns a subgroup to evaluate vendors, schedules a series of working sessions, and waits.
Six months later, the committee has produced a slide deck and a recommended "phased approach."
Meanwhile, the competitor down the street has quietly automated three workflows and freed up twelve hours a week per person on their revenue operations team.
The problem is almost never resources. It is almost never access to tools. It is almost always rhythm.
Organizations change through repetition, not proclamation. And the fastest way to build an AI-fluent culture is not a mandate from the top - it is a habit installed into something your team already does.
Why "Awareness" Is the Asset Nobody Is Building
Here is a data point worth sitting with.
Deloitte's 2026 enterprise AI survey found that insufficient worker skills remain the single biggest barrier to integrating AI into existing workflows - cited by more organizations than budget constraints, security concerns, or tool availability combined.
But here is what that finding actually means in practice: it is not that people can't use the tools.
It is that most employees have never seen someone use them well.
They have never watched a peer solve a real problem with AI in real time. They have no mental model for what "good" looks like in their function.
That is not a training problem. It is an exposure problem. And there's no course in the world to solve that. But proximity to people who are experimenting and willing to share is the magic bullet.
The 10-minute weekly AI brief is how you create that proximity without adding a single meeting to anyone's calendar.
The Simple Protocol We Started Recommending
For businesses that are really falling behind with using AI, we have a simple ask. And it only takes 10 minutes before or after a planned meeting
One person shares something they tried with AI that week - a tool, a prompt, a workflow. It does not have to be polished. It does not have to have worked. The only rule is that it has to be real.
Then we spend three minutes on one question: where could this apply in what we are working on right now?
That is it. No deck. No prep. No designated AI champion.
Just a consistent container for the kind of informal knowledge-sharing that used to happen in hallways and now needs to be scheduled because nobody is in the same building anymore.
But the stories we got back surprised me. Within six weeks, people who had never described themselves as "AI people" were showing up to Monday sync with experiments of their own. The weekly segment had given them permission to try things, and a place to share them without feeling like they needed to be an expert first.
The organizational learning curve stopped being individual and started being collective.
That is when you start moving fast.
How to Set This Up This Week: The Exact System
Here is the full implementation, tool recommendations included. This should take you about 45 minutes to set up and zero ongoing overhead to run.
Step 1: Attach it to an existing meeting. Do not create a new meeting. Find the weekly or biweekly leadership sync that already has the highest attendance and add 10 minutes to the end. Put it on the calendar now with a note that says "AI Brief - rotating share." The behavioral science here is called habit stacking - attaching a new behavior to an existing anchor dramatically increases the probability it sticks. A standalone AI meeting will get deprioritized the moment things get busy. A segment inside a meeting people already attend will not.
Step 2: Assign a rotating owner. Do not let this default to the most tech-savvy person on your team. Rotate ownership weekly through every leader in the room. This serves two purposes: it forces breadth of experimentation across functions, and it removes the "that's an IT thing" mental model that kills adoption. When your head of HR has to show up on Thursday with something to share, she will spend twenty minutes this week actually trying something. That twenty minutes is worth more than any training program you could buy.
Step 3: Give them a starting prompt. For the first few cycles, remove the friction of figuring out what to share by giving people a specific assignment. Here are three that work well for your audience:
For HR and People leaders: Use Claude (claude.ai) or ChatGPT to draft a job description for a role you are currently hiring for. Note where it was useful, where it was off, and what you had to fix. Bring that to the brief.
For RevOps and CRO teams: Pull a recent pipeline report and paste the summary into an AI tool. Ask it to identify the top three risks in the current quarter based on the data. Compare its read to your own instinct. Bring the delta to the brief.
For CX and Customer Service leaders: Take your three most common customer complaints from the past 30 days and ask an AI tool to suggest root cause hypotheses and potential process fixes. Bring one that surprised you.
Step 4: Use a shared log to capture what surfaces. This does not need to be elaborate. A shared Google Doc or a dedicated Notion page with a simple running table works fine. Columns: Date, Who Shared, Tool Used, What They Tried, Potential Application. After eight weeks, this log becomes something genuinely valuable - a functional map of where AI is already seeping into your organization and where the highest-leverage opportunities live.
Step 5: Name the pattern out loud when you see it. Your job as the leader is not to evaluate or grade what people share. It is to reflect the pattern back when you see it. "That is the third time someone has mentioned using AI for first-draft documentation. We should probably standardize that." That kind of observation, made in the room, is what converts individual experiments into organizational practice.
The Compounding Return You Are Not Seeing Yet
There is a reason I called this the leadership move that costs nothing and compounds forever.
The tools are not the hard part. The tools are cheap, accessible, and getting better every week. What is genuinely scarce - and genuinely differentiating - is an organization where people feel safe to experiment, share what did not work, and build on each other's attempts.
That culture does not come from a policy. It does not come from a vendor.
It comes from a leader who makes space for it every single week, even when things are busy, even when there is nothing dramatic to report.
The organizations that will have a meaningful AI advantage in 18 months are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools.
They are the ones where learning is already structural - where it is built into the rhythm of the week rather than dependent on someone's initiative.
Ten minutes. An existing meeting. A rotating owner. A shared log.
That is the whole system. The only question is whether you start this week or wait until someone above you asks why you haven't.
Find your next edge,
Eli
Want help applying this to your product or strategy? We’re ready when you are → Let's get started.
