How Leaders Can Stay Ahead in the Age of AI: 5 Moves to Avoid Falling Behind
The AI Acceleration Trap
AI progress is moving faster than any other technological shift in living memory. The cost of running GPT-3.5-class models has dropped 280x in just 18 months, while frontier-scale models like GPT-5 from OpenAI and Gemini 2.5 from Google have grown 5.6x since 2022. For leaders staying ahead in the age of AI, this acceleration creates both unprecedented opportunities and risks.
Adoption is spreading four times faster than the desktop internet. Let that one sink in.
For leaders, this means the old strategy of “wait and see” is no longer viable.
The data is already in: early adopters are growing revenue 1.5x faster than peers. The biggest risk isn’t moving too fast, but instead moving too slow while competitors normalize AI across workflows. The gap between fast learners and fast followers compounds quickly. By the time you think you’re catching up, the leaders have already codified new ways of working.
What I’ve Seen in Teams That Win
At our agency, we’ve seen this play out firsthand. The companies pulling ahead don’t always have the largest budgets or the most advanced models. What they do have is clarity. Leaders who set a clear adoption goal, role-model usage. And employees that normalize experimentation are creating environments where AI isn’t a novelty but already a huge part of their daily workflow.
One CEO I worked with set a company-wide expectation: every employee should use AI tools at least 10 times a day. This wasn't some kind of veiled micromanagement tactic. This woman simply knew that adoption begins with hands-on experimentation.
Another executive normalized the change simply by sharing at all-hands meetings, “Here’s how I used AI this week to prep for a board meeting.” Small signals compound into cultural momentum.
Five Moves to Stay Ahead
For anybody who doesn't think of themselves as a leader, it's time to think again. Whether you carry out these actions to an entire company, your team, or to yourself, we all have a high level of agency when it comes to preparing for all that is to come with the AI revolution.
1. Align: Tell a compelling “why.” Tie AI adoption to concrete business drivers: competitive pressure, customer expectations, or sustaining growth. Employees adopt change faster when they see how AI enhances their skills and makes their work more meaningful.
2. Activate: Invest in people, not just tools. Nearly half of employees say they lack the training to confidently adopt AI, and they rank training as the single most important factor for successful adoption. Build role-specific learning, launch internal champions, and give people protected time to experiment.
3. Amplify: Share what works. Wins hidden in silos are wasted. Create a shared knowledge hub, publish monthly AI success stories, and encourage peer-to-peer learning. Notion prototyped what became Notion AI in a focused hackathon. Within weeks, it went from experiment to a core product feature because learnings spread quickly across teams.
4. Accelerate: Remove bottlenecks. If it still takes months to approve tool access or data requests, your teams will never get out of pilot purgatory. Companies like Estée Lauder set up centralized GPT labs, collecting thousands of employee ideas and rapidly scaling the most promising ones. Empower cross-functional councils to fast-track approvals so high-value ideas don’t die in committee.
5. Govern: Balance speed with responsibility. Governance shouldn’t be a brake pedal; it should be a steering wheel. A simple playbook that outlines “safe-to-try” use cases keeps teams moving without putting the business at risk. Quarterly reviews keep those rules relevant as tools and regulations evolve.
The New Leadership Divide
AI isn’t just another tool; instead, it’s a new way of working. The leaders who stay ahead will be the ones who move fast but stay disciplined: quick to adopt, quick to share, quick to adapt, but grounded in purpose and safety. Everyone else will be playing catch-up.
Even outside tech, the pattern holds. The San Antonio Spurs, (an NBA franchise using AI for front-office operations like scouting, analysis, and business workflows) boosted staff fluency from 14% to 85% by embedding training into daily work. Adoption sticks when learning is built into the job, not treated as homework.
The question to ask in your next leadership meeting is simple: Are we experimenting fast enough to actually learn, or just running pilots to look busy?
“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” - Malcolm X
If you'd like to see more on investing in people, check out how we cover literacy, readiness, regulatory, and change management.
Find your next edge,
Eli
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