Strategies that survive contact with the technology

Kate brought clarity to one of the hardest questions in adopting AI: which decisions should remain human, even when they can be automated. She identified where human judgement remained critical and translated that into clear decision rights. Those decision rights are now part of how we operate.

Kate understands something easily missed in transformation at this scale: technology can move faster than the organisation’s ability to absorb it. She identified where capability needed to be in place before the technology arrived. That changed the sequencing of the work and gave us greater confidence in the organisation’s ability to deliver the strategy.

I asked Kate what our leaders still needed to be exceptional at as AI became part of how they worked. Her findings challenged some of our assumptions about leadership. We changed part of our leadership development as a result, particularly where we had assumed technology would compensate for capability rather than change what capability was required.

Kate raised an issue we are increasingly seeing with clients: as AI takes on more of the work, what happens to the capability of the people using it? She brought evidence to a question that had largely been based on assumption. It has influenced how we think about AI transformation and some of the conversations we now have with clients.

Kate made us look at AI adoption through a very different lens. We were measuring what the technology was enabling, but not what our people might be losing as they relied on it more. Her work gave us visibility into that. It changed some of our assumptions about AI and became part of how we think about developing leaders and managers.