Every leader plans to use AI to accelerate "mission-critical" operations. But by deploying AI solely for efficiency, leaders risk creating a culture that rewards speed over creativity and is incapable of being "critical of the mission". To generate value from AI, leaders must help their employees be more effective and, therefore, essential.

The talk argues that leaders cannot save their way to a competitive advantage: they must continuously invest in building capabilities and upgrading the employee experience. More than anything else we can control, workflow design underpins culture. And culture, as Peter Drucker said, eats strategy for breakfast.

Learning aids and outcomes:

- Find job-preserving efficiencies by infusing workflows with AI to make your team more effective, rather than obsolete.
- Rethink incentives and shift from crude efficiency metrics to reward creativity, originality, and problem-solving.
- Mind the traps of AI sycophancy that stifles debate and diversity, and the AI Mediocrity that disincentivises excellence.
- Bring customers closer by encouraging “Job Crafting” to redirect time saved from automating routine tasks into deeper relationships.