Most organizations are treating AI like a software upgrade. Buy the licenses, hand it to IT, measure adoption rates, call it a transformation. It isn't.

Charlene Li has spent the last several years inside organizations actually leading AI transformation — not just talking about it — and her diagnosis is blunt: the problem isn't the technology. It's that leaders keep handing off a leadership challenge to the wrong person. When the CEO outsources AI to the CIO, the whole organization stays stuck in adoption mode. Tools get installed. Behavior doesn't change. Value doesn't follow.

In this conversation, Charlene and I dig into what leading AI transformation actually requires — why it has to start at the strategic level, how to move past the fear and stigma that keeps most employees treating AI like a cheat code, and what governance looks like when it accelerates instead of stalls progress. We also get into the jagged frontier debate, what AI fluency actually means for next-generation leaders, and why the most dangerous question you can ask your team isn't "are you using AI?" — it's "what are you using it for?"

If you're a senior leader sitting on a pile of licenses and not much to show for it, this conversation is for you.

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