When the role of AI in business is discussed these days, the conversation often turns to the challenge of separating the AI hype from the AI reality. Beyond the exciting potential this fast-evolving technology holds, there’s confusion about what AI can actually do, and how much business leaders should be leveraging it in their day-to-day operations. There’s a fear of moving too fast with AI, while at the same time a worry about being left behind.
There’s also anxiety about the threat of being replaced by AI. But “AI or me?” is the wrong way to think about this revolutionary technology. Instead, you should embrace the idea that AI is here to save time and improve performance—not eliminate jobs. After the dust settles, I believe there will be more work than ever for humans.
So how should today’s business leaders—especially the chief technology decision-makers such as CTOs, CIOs, and CDOs—be thinking about AI?
Here’s what we know today: AI is becoming more powerful as companies increasingly refine natural language processing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models create more relevant returns, and models like DeepSeek mimic human learning with less compute power. Simultaneously, access is expanding as new interfaces designed for everyday users shift today’s prevailing programming language from Python to the spoken word.
All of this rapid change means that in order to stay ahead of the game, it’s vitally important that business leaders learn to adapt. An adaptable mindset is a major asset as a leader, and it is essential when integrating AI meaningfully into your operations. I come from the data world, where engineers have long adopted the mindsets and strategies that business leaders must now embrace to transform AI from a bunch of hype into real-world ROI.
An adaptable mindset is a major asset as a leader, and it is essential when integrating AI meaningfully into your operations.
While there are many unknowns about the future of AI, there are also specific, concrete steps business leaders can take starting today to help them navigate these unchartered waters. Here are a few suggestions to help you purposefully and deliberately bring AI into your personal and professional life.
AI-minded actions you can take today
- Monitor the AI space closely and make sure you understand how it’s evolving: Be an active participant in AI advancement. Engage with the community of engineers and dreamers advancing the space through conferences and online forums. Subscribe to newsletters and listen to podcasts. Stay tuned in and curious.
- Use AI on a regular basis in your normal, daily work: Every tool will soon have AI embedded into it, so understanding the technology is critical. Get familiar with AI in your personal life by using it to make travel plans, write emails, and automate other minor daily tasks. Use an AI notetaker app in your video meetings to summarize the discussion and send action items to participants afterwards. When you use AI like a personal assistant, your experience, understanding, and insight into its workings—not to mention its limitations—will expand.
- Try using AI as a teacher: Another way to weave AI into your daily life is to use it to improve your personal or professional abilities. AI has the ability to be the world’s greatest teacher, so ask it to ask you questions—and then grade your performance. This approach allows for greater command over the tools, increased familiarity with their capabilities, and a little self-improvement, too.
- Find a use case that’s small and safe, and implement it: When applying AI to business, start with low-risk use cases. Look for applications where humans can still be involved but the process can be enhanced via AI. For example, use AI to do an initial review of a contract or to generate image descriptions, layering on human oversight. As a general rule, the narrower the application, the more accurate the output. These small projects pave the way for additional experimentation.
- Ensure your employees are AI literate: Now is the time to develop programming to upskill employees in AI and ensure that new hires are decently well versed in the space. In data engineering, we should no longer delineate between software engineers and AI engineers. Given the technology’s trajectory—where AI will be integrated into most roles and tools—engineers must understand the technology no matter what they’re building.
AI has the ability to be the world’s greatest teacher, so ask it to ask you questions—and then grade your performance. This approach allows for greater command over the tools, increased familiarity with their capabilities, and a little self-improvement, too.
Keep security top of mind with AI
As your AI understanding and use cases grow, it’s important to evolve with guardrails in place. When it comes to AI, security should never be put on the back burner. As tempting as it may be to introduce more data sets to train models, sensitive data should never be used for this purpose. Simultaneously, if your business builds AI models to share with customers, data from other customers shouldn’t be used for training since there are ways for savvy users—whether nefarious or not—to extract that information from the end product.
With proper rigor, leaders can build trust not just among their employees, but also in the potential of AI. When you start small, stay adaptable, and continue to involve human beings through the process, AI will undoubtedly boost performance. Maintain these guardrails and raise the bar gradually as the technology and your own understanding improve.
As new waves of AI products hit the market, like the autonomously operating agentic AI that everyone in the industry is buzzing about, apply the same processes I’ve described to test them instead of being seduced by the promise of the next big thing. By employing these strategies, businesses won’t lose sight of their big goals but can still learn, adapt their models, and evolve alongside the technology.
In the end, be an optimist
AI will continue its forward march and rapidly find its way into everything we do. We can already see this happening—just open up your Gmail account and watch the prompts appear. Anxieties about new technologies are normal and, in fact, have almost always accompanied innovation. Today, we sit in the uncomfortable space of the in-between, where there is much we don’t yet know about the trajectory of AI.
For now, success requires business leaders to navigate through this uncertainty. I recommend adopting the AI mindset: Engage with AI as an open-minded learner, start small, and build trust. Apply the technology where you can, learn from your mistakes, and most importantly, be optimistic about the future. Somewhere between the fear and the big promises of AI is the actual truth—leading with this balanced perspective will spur innovation and give your business the competitive advantage.
Adopt the AI mindset: Engage with AI as an open-minded learner, start small, and build trust. Apply the technology where you can, learn from your mistakes, and most importantly, be optimistic about the future.
The truth is, all product companies will need to embrace AI if they want to thrive. At Coalesce, we infuse AI into both our product and our processes so that our team as well as our customers can be successful. This includes making data more discoverable and governable with our AI-powered data catalog and AI Documentation Assistant, empowering data teams to create a scalable foundation for their AI projects.