Before we gave AI to anyone, we taught the executive. That sequencing was deliberate, and I’d defend it fiercely.
The standard technology playbook works the other way. Roll out to early adopters, generate momentum, and brief leadership through steering committees. Leaders learn about it as a program: milestones, risks, benefits. They govern something they’ve never touched.
With AI, that playbook fails, and it fails in a particular way. This technology raises questions only leaders can answer. What’s our appetite when a tool is useful but fallible? What do we expect of people who use it? What work should never be delegated to it? If leaders are learning at the same pace as everyone else, or slower, those questions either get answered by default, by whoever moves first, or they get parked, and the program stalls while everyone waits.
So we started at the top. Executive education first, real education, hands-on, not a briefing deck. Then senior leaders. Then, and this raised eyebrows, our people team, before any broad rollout. That one mattered more than almost anything. AI adoption is a change program wearing a technology costume, and the people who lead culture, capability and change needed to be fluent early, not consulted late.
Only then did we open it up to fifty people, learn, and then open it to the whole organisation.
What did the sequencing buy us? When the hard questions arrived, and they arrived fast, leaders had enough personal experience to engage with substance. Nobody was governing based on what they read, or what people told them, it was governed on what they had experienced. And when staff looked up to see whether this was real, they saw leaders who could speak from use rather than from talking points. Remember that people take their cues from what leaders do, not what they announce.
There’s a simple test hiding in this. Ask your executive team to describe the last thing they personally did with AI. The answers will tell you whether your organisation is ready to scale, long before any readiness assessment does.