— The book · Volume I
AI for Business Leaders.
A clear-headed guide to leading with AI without losing the plot.
This is neither. Executives are being told, simultaneously, that AI will transform everything overnight and that they must already have a strategy in place. Both are pressure tactics. Neither is a way of thinking.
AI for Business Leaders is a clear-headed guide for executives who must move now but want to move clearly. A structured way of thinking — not a list of tools, not a vendor catalog. Questions before answers.
A clear-headed guide to leading with AI without losing the plot.
For founders, CEOs, and senior operators. AI for Business Leaders is short, structured, and unromantic about the technology. It begins where most strategy work fails — by asking the right questions before recommending a single tool.
Read the book →The framework is structured as eight questions. Each is built to be hard to answer in a paragraph and impossible to answer in a tweet. They are meant to be sat with — by you, by your leadership team, by the board. The strategy that follows is the answer made visible.
Not where AI is exciting. Not where AI looks good in a press release. Where, in the actual mechanics of how you make money or create value, is there a constraint that AI could shift more cheaply than humans? Most companies answer this honestly for the first time when they sit with this question.
The defensive answer. There are parts of your business where AI deployment is irresponsible, premature, or simply destructive of the thing you are trying to protect. Naming these explicitly — and committing to them in writing — is the most underused move in AI strategy.
Not the headcount conversation. The work conversation. How does the daily texture of an engineer's, a designer's, a salesperson's, a recruiter's job change when AI is a colleague, not a tool? The leaders who can answer this concretely are the ones who get the deployment right.
When does a task pass from the AI back to a human? When does it pass forward? Who decides the boundary? Without a protocol, the boundary becomes accidental — and accidents in this space compound.
AI doesn't just change what you do. It changes what should be measured. A team's value can no longer be its output velocity; it has to be its quality of decision-making at scale. The dashboards have to evolve before the headcount does.
Not a values poster. A specific posture: what kinds of mistakes are catastrophic, what kinds are tolerable, what is the recovery mechanism. The companies that survive the next decade will be the ones whose posture was set early — not the ones who built the policy after the incident.
Fluency is not training. Fluency is the comfort of working with AI the way you work with email — pervasive, default, transparent. The leaders who get this right invest in fluency for everyone, not just the engineering team.
The last question is the most personal. How do you, as a leader, want to be remembered for handling this period? Cautious? Aggressive? Curious? Defensive? Choose the posture deliberately. The organisation will mirror it.
The book names almost no specific products. Tools change quarterly. The framework is built to outlast the current tool generation.
AI will not transform everything overnight. Most companies will deploy it badly before deploying it well. The book is honest about that, and is more useful because it is honest.
AI will also not destroy your business overnight. The companies that panic make bad early bets and lock themselves out of better later ones. Clarity beats urgency.
It does not require you to know how transformers work. It assumes you know how to run a business and asks how AI fits inside that craft.
The leaders who get AI right will not be the ones who moved first. They will be the ones who thought clearest.
Every executive I work with — across industries, geographies, company stages — is being told two contradictory things. Move fast or be left behind. And: be careful or you will destroy something you cannot rebuild. Both are true. Both are also useless without a way to hold them together.
The companies I see succeed with AI share a small set of habits. They take the questions seriously. They invest in fluency before tools. They name what they will not use AI for and stick to it. They redesign their metrics. They lead through example rather than mandate. And they hold a clear posture through what is, undeniably, a noisy decade.
AI for Business Leaders is the framework I share with those operators. It is the first book in the series for a reason: most of the questions about decisions, execution, and hiring that the later books address only make sense once the AI question has been answered. Not the AI question. Your AI question.
— Adapted from the preface to AI for Business Leaders