How to Talk to Leadership About AI

🧭 THIS WEEK AT AI SECOND ACT

Howdy, this is a tough week as we take our eldest daughter to college here in the US for the first time :(.

This week - speaking AI to leadership, some intros and initial inputs to start sparking interest and change management within your org.

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👉 You can also just hit "Reply" and let me know what you want more (or less) of or use the poll to give feedback.

🧰 AI NEWS + LEARNING

Here’s a few things I found recently:

• AI upskilling guide for executives - this is a hint towards the direction AI Second Act will go. We need to discuss and learn more about AI transformation and leadership vs (more basic) tips/tactics.

  • Recent news articles and a McKinsey report stating AI is not giving value in real life yet!

  • Some first thoughts as we dive into this domain more in future -

    • Change Management must come from the top - executive leaders must know and use and learn AI!

    • Despite the hype, there is no ‘easy’ button and AI will not ‘simply’ just boost revenue or cut costs.

    • Instead, do the harder things:

      • Engage, guide and get feedback from employees as AI is rolled out

      • Find quick wins and use cases all employees can use almost immediately

      • Invest in training and upskilling

      • Expect AI use - do not accept (after some time) continued reluctance to use AI - your competitors are likely using AI more than you are!

      • Find valuable but narrow and specific use cases for AI to improve

        • Implement one at a time, learning and iterating in some sequence vs 20 new initiatives/tools, all failing simultaneously

      • More coming in future!

• How Google employees are using AI

• Featured notebooks at NotebookLM. Incredible tool we introduced last week now has featured notebooks you can use for learning, including an advice notebook, based on bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks' "How to Build A Life" columns in The Atlantic

🗺️ FEATURED INSIGHT

How to Talk to Leadership About AI

Your leadership team knows AI is "important" but has no clue what it actually does beyond "writing emails".

Here's how to introduce specific AI capabilities that matter to VPs with concrete next steps they can approve this week.

What Leadership Really Needs to Know

Skip the philosophy. Focus on these six capabilities that directly impact your operations: [there are of course others, but this is a great start].

1. Document Intelligence

What it does: Summarise 50-page reports in 2 minutes, extract key decisions from meeting notes, compare contract terms across vendors.

Your intro: "AI can read through our entire Q3 vendor review docs and give me the top 3 risks and 2 cost-saving opportunities in 5 minutes. Currently takes our team 2 days."

Next step: "Let me test it on our last quarterly review docs and show you the results next week."

2. Communication Acceleration

What it does: Draft emails, meeting agendas, status reports, and stakeholder updates in seconds.

Your intro: "AI can draft our weekly executive summary based on project dashboards and team inputs. Same quality, 80% less time."

Next step: "I'll draft next week's update using AI and you can compare it to our usual version."

3. Data Analysis

What it does: Process spreadsheets, identify trends, create visualisations, spot anomalies in datasets.

Your intro: "Instead of waiting 3 days for finance to analyse vendor spending patterns, AI can surface insights in 10 minutes and suggest where we're overpaying."

Next step: "Let me run our Q3 spending data through AI and present findings at Friday's budget meeting."

4. Code and System Support

What it does: Debug software issues, suggest fixes, automate repetitive tasks, review code quality. Even write unit tests!

Your intro: "Our development team spends 30% of their time debugging. AI can identify and often fix common issues automatically, freeing them up for new features." Or “we never write unit tests as we never have time, how about we try tasking AI to write unit tests”?.

Next step: "Let's pilot AI debugging and unit test tools with the team for 12 weeks and measure time savings."

5. Knowledge Management

What it does: Create searchable knowledge bases from documents, emails, and conversations. Answer questions about past projects instantly.

Your intro: "AI can turn all our project documentation into a searchable assistant. Instead of digging through SharePoint for 20 minutes, anyone can ask 'What were the key risks from the Perth project?' and get answers immediately."

Next step: "I'll upload our last 3 major project files and create a demo knowledge base for the team."

6. Research and Analysis

What it does: Competitive research, market analysis, risk assessment, scenario planning.

Your intro: "AI can analyse our competitors' public strategies and product announcements to identify market gaps we're missing."

Next step: "Let me create a competitive landscape analysis using AI and present it at next month's strategy session."

The 30-Second Pitch Template

Use this structure for any capability:

"AI can [specific task] in [time] instead of [current process taking X time]. This means [business impact]. Can I test this on [specific example] and show you results in [timeframe]?"

Example: "AI can analyse customer complaints and identify top 3 product issues in 15 minutes instead of our current monthly review process. This means faster response to quality problems. Can I test this on last month's support tickets and show you results by Thursday?"

What Not to Say

Avoid: "AI will transform everything." Instead: "AI will help Sarah spend less time on reports and more time on strategy."

Avoid: "We need an AI strategy." Instead: "We should test AI on vendor analysis since that takes 6 hours every month."

Avoid: "Everyone's doing AI." Instead: "This specific tool solved the exact problem you mentioned last week."

Your Next Step

Pick one capability that solves a problem your leadership mentioned in the last month. Test it yourself this week. Present results next week.

The goal isn't selling AI. It's showing how it fixes real problems they already know about.

Which capability resonates most with your leadership team's current challenges? Hit reply and let me know what you're testing first.

Start AI leadership & transformation one step at time.
— Brett

👉 Hit “Reply” and share your experience — I read every one!

_{Picture by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash.}