It wasn’t because of a bad quarter or a dip in the market. It’s because after three years of shoveling millions into AI, most organizations haven’t actually changed. They’ve just become faster versions of their old, clunky selves. And for the leaders at the top, it’s a brutal sink-or-swim moment.
I’ve spent the last few years in the trenches with enterprise leaders – in dozens of boardrooms and on Zooms at all hours of the night – as they wrestle with this reality. And the part no one wants to hear while staring at a stagnant ROI dashboard is that this isn’t a tech failure. It’s a failure of leadership to adapt.
Leadership playbooks were built for a different era. Enterprises have spent decades promoting people who manage complexity. The bigger the org chart and the more layers you oversee, the higher you climb. But in the agentic era, that model is fundamentally backwards. Complexity is exactly what suffocates scale.
What we’re witnessing is a generational transfer of power. And the leaders we see actually scaling AI have realized this is a leadership transformation first. They aren’t reaching for the familiar, comfortable playbook that got them the corner office. They’re tearing it apart and radically rebuilding from the inside out. Here are the three shifts that define them.
1. They Design for Radical Simplicity
The first shift is a relentless attack on the organizational drag.
The leaders driving agentic AI forward have shifted into ‘rebuild mode’. That’s a very different exercise. It’s a zero-based design, and it starts with asking:
- What actually matters here? Don’t look at a step on your flowchart and ask, “How can AI make this step faster?” Clear the whiteboard entirely. Take your most critical processes – product launches, customer onboarding, closing the books – and redesign them around the outcome, not the org chart. If you find yourself asking, “How did this survive for 20 years?” – that step goes.
- Is this ‘approval theater’? Look at every approval, review, and sign-off and ask whether it adds real judgment – or just moves information along. If it’s the latter, it’s bureaucratic scar tissue. That step doesn’t belong in a meeting or a manager’s inbox anymore. Cut it.
- Is this pure coordination? Scan for status meetings, Slack threads, and “just-in-case” checks whose only purpose is keeping people aligned. Replace it with an agent that tracks progress, flags issues, and routes decisions automatically. Cancel the recurring meeting.
Only leadership can look at a workflow and say, “this is where we add our genius, that part has to go.” That doesn’t fall on your product or ops team. This is now the most important part of your job.
2. They Redefine How People Grow
The second shift is about people.
Too many leaders are focused on job loss. But if an agent can replace what someone – or an entire team – does today, what does that say about the job we designed for them?
We’ve defined value far too narrowly. Roles are built around execution: how many tasks you complete, how busy you look. Career growth follows the same logic: manage more people, climb the ladder, earn a bigger title. But AI breaks that entire value system.
Forward-thinking leaders aren’t asking less of their people, they’re raising the bar. They’re asking what humans are uniquely capable of – the work that makes someone irreplaceable – and rethinking roles from the ground up:
- Strip and rebuild. Take one role on your team and remove every task an agent can do – data entry, report generation, status updates, first-draft creation. Then rewrite the role around setting direction, making judgment calls, and being accountable for the result.
- Expand scope. Narrow job specs are a relic of the past. Redesign roles to encourage sideways growth and skill stacking, creating true “generalists”. Take your “content strategist” and make them a “growth architect” who orchestrates content, distribution, analytics, and optimization. Sideways growth, skill stacking.
- Redesign growth. Career ladders are dead. The next era of your career won’t be driven by experience, credentials, or hustle, it’ll be driven by AI leverage. Promote people based on how effectively they multiply their impact. Let people follow problems across functions, not titles up a ladder.
The most creative, strategic, and human work of our careers is ahead of us.
3. They Expand the Boundaries of Ambition
The final shift is about ambition.
Strategy used to be a constant negotiation between the possible and the practical. Ambition was tethered to “resource reality,” restricted by budget, headcount, and hours in a day.
That constraint vanished. Forward-thinking leaders aren’t using AI to squeeze out a 10% productivity lift – faster decks, leaner teams, more output from the same workflows. They’re using it to go after new territory.
The leaders we work with are already operating on a different plane. In strategy meetings, they’ve flipped the question from “What can we afford to do?” to “What can we build now that execution is free?”
Start with the excuses you pulled two years ago. Maybe it’s “We can’t scale customer success without hiring 50 more people,“ or “We can’t enter SMB — the economics don’t work.”
Then, ask again:
- What if you could serve everyone like your top 1%?: Instead of asking how to better segment customers, ask how to deliver 1:1 expertise to everyone, not just your high-value accounts. AI makes personalized experiences economically viable at scale.
- Which timelines can we shatter? Research, development, experimentation – work that ran on multi-year cycles – can now ship in weeks. Take one strategic initiative currently on your three-year roadmap. Force it into a 90-day window.
- Which markets are we still treating as “too hard”? Skip the years-long localization plans and use an agent to handle language, support, and compliance. Leaders can now enter new markets simultaneously, not sequentially. What if we could run 1,000 simultaneous pricing experiments instead of one A/B test?
This isn’t a brainstorming exercise. It’s a shift in competitive strategy. When one company can move from idea to market in weeks – and another is still planning around human-scale execution – they’re no longer competing on the same field.
The New Leadership Mandate
This isn’t a technology problem. The tools, the capabilities, the success stories, they’re all here. What’s missing is leadership.
I see leaders every day who are leaning in and doing the hard work of rebuilding. They’re rewriting how work gets done, opening new paths for their people, and building businesses that were architecturally impossible just a few years ago.
Jobs will change and workflows will be dismantled – not as an act of destruction, but as an act of progress. It’s on leaders to forge the next generation, and there’s an entire generation willing to step into that role.
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