Finding future leaders for AI starts with a hard truth: more than ninety per cent of your company’s future leaders are not your current leaders, and you do not find them by recruiting. You find them by building a structure safe enough that they identify themselves.
The question current leaders have to answer
The current leaders are not automatically discarded, but they face a hard question: are you willing to pay the personal price to change, to take apart your own belief systems, to list honestly the decisions you got wrong, and to become someone different? If yes, you remain useful and can be a future leader too. If no, you are not useful any more, and that is a choice you made, not a sentence handed to you.
You do not hunt for the new leaders. They find you.
The instinct is to go hunting. That instinct is wrong, because they find you. Create a role that is genuinely protected, untouchable by corporate politics and the usual agendas, and make it safe to step into, and the right people raise their hand and say, that is me. In a company of ten thousand you might have one or two. They are there, and they are waiting. The expression fits exactly: the sleeper has awoken. Once they have your backing, they work without stopping, because they have waited their whole career for permission and protection. These are often the same people already quietly outperforming with AI while the organisation fails to notice.
Keep your old judgment out of the room
You will be shocked by who they turn out to be. Your only job is to keep your old picture of them out of the room. The person you had filed under a particular ceiling is often the one who steps up, and if the old judgment walks in with you, you will miss them. The same applies to people outside the company. How do you signal the door is open? You announce what you are doing, and you make the announcement sound a little crazy. You will attract some time-wasters, but the right ones, internal and external, you will know within seconds.
Vulnerability is the whole thread
This requires doing something you have not done before: being open, and being willing to be vulnerable. That is the thread running through everything in AI. The more willing you are to admit you got things wrong, that your assumptions were wrong, that you are not quite the person you told everyone you were, the more you get out of AI, because you start asking it honest questions. The leader in denial asks AI only the questions that protect their image, and gets back hollow answers. It is the same reason boards are the furthest behind on AI: the gap is not technical, it is the willingness to be exposed.
So be vulnerable, build the safe structure, and keep your old judgments at the door. The leaders you need are already inside the building, waiting to be let in. Helping leaders build that structure is what I do with executive teams.
Frequently asked questions
Where do a company’s future AI leaders actually come from? More than ninety per cent of them are not your current leaders, and you do not find them by recruiting. You find them by building a structure safe enough that they identify themselves. The leaders you need are already inside the building, waiting for permission and protection to step forward.
Are today’s leaders simply discarded? No. They face a hard question: are you willing to pay the personal price to change, to take apart your own belief systems, to list the decisions you got wrong honestly, and to become someone different? If yes, they remain useful and can be future leaders too. If no, they are no longer useful, and that is a choice they made, not a sentence handed to them.
Should a leader go hunting for these hidden people? No, the instinct to hunt is wrong, because they find you. Create a role that is genuinely protected, untouchable by corporate politics, and make it safe to step into, and the right people raise their hand. In a company of ten thousand there may be only one or two, but they are there and waiting.
What most often stops a leader from seeing them? Their own old judgment. The person filed under a particular ceiling is often the one who steps up, and if the old picture walks into the room, the leader misses them. The single job is to keep that outdated judgment out of the room and let people surprise you.
Why is vulnerability the thread running through all of this? Because being open about getting things wrong is what lets a leader ask AI, and their people, honest questions. A leader in denial asks only the questions that protect their image and gets hollow answers back. The same willingness to be exposed is what separates leaders and boards who benefit from AI from those who fall behind.
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organisations including IBM, the WHO, the World Government Summit and the European Commission. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster and closed over $500 million in enterprise transformation deals as CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant.