I block hours in my diary every week to learn about AI. Not to use it. To learn about it.
I want to be honest about how strange that felt at first. Executive diaries are trophies of busyness. Every slot is contested. Blocking time to read, experiment and take courses felt indulgent, almost like something I should hide. Real leaders are in meetings.
But I kept noticing something. The field moves so fast that whatever I knew three months ago was already out of date. Capabilities that were simply impossible in one quarter became routine in the next. If my mental model of AI was out of date, then every decision I made about risk, investment and people was being made against a world that no longer existed.
So I made learning part of the job. I did formal study with MIT. I read broadly. But mostly I practise. I test new capabilities against my real work and pay attention to where they succeed and where they fail. The failures teach me more than the successes. They are what calibrate my judgement about what we should and shouldn’t trust these tools to do.
Here’s what surprised me. The return isn’t just that I’m personally more productive, although I am. It’s that the quality of the questions I ask has changed. In investment discussions, in risk conversations, in vendor meetings, I can probe claims instead of accepting them. I can tell the difference between a genuine capability and brochure-ware or AI-washing.
In a regulated environment, that judgement is the asset. Policies and controls matter, but they are written by people, and those people are working from their current understanding of what this technology can do.
How current is yours? And when did you last put time in your own diary to learn something new?