Roughly one in six people worldwide use AI regularly, according to Microsoft’s own Global AI Diffusion Report. Everyone else who has an opinion about it, including the strong ones shaping boardroom decisions this week, formed that opinion from a headline, not from their own hands on the tool.
What actually triggered this?
This week a young researcher resigned from Anthropic warning that the people building AI privately fear it could threaten humanity. The story reached my own son at university in Italy within two days. He had never used the technology himself. Neither, most likely, had most of the people who shared it, argued about it, or let it change how they think about their own company’s plans. An opinion formed entirely from secondhand fear is not the same as knowledge, no matter how many people hold it.
What does using AI properly actually look like?
I use AI every day, and not for novelty. I use it to sharpen my own thinking before a difficult conversation, to plan a day that will actually go well instead of one that only looks organized on paper, and to simulate the kind of advisors most people never get access to, the ones who ask the question you were hoping nobody would. The effect has not been chaos. It has been calm. Clearer thinking produces fewer surprises, and fewer surprises is what makes someone better at their job. Most employees never get shown what that actually looks like, which is why so few of them get there on their own.
None of that is a promise that AI makes everyone calmer. Used badly, it can just as easily produce the opposite, a person who never switches off and mistakes constant input for progress. The difference is not the tool. It is whether the person using it has actually learned to use it well, which takes real hours, not a headline.
Why does this gap matter more than people think?
Here is what should worry a leader far more than any resignation letter. A person plus AI, used properly, is not a small improvement over a person alone. It compounds with every new model, every new capability, every few weeks. The gap this opens between someone who has crossed that threshold and someone who has not is not a productivity gap. It becomes a control gap. Someone operating with that advantage is making better decisions, faster, with clearer sight of what is coming, while someone without it is reacting to a world they can no longer fully see. Leaders already sense this gap even when they will not say so directly. Nobody has to intend to be controlled for that gap to matter. It happens quietly, through nothing more dramatic than one person seeing further ahead than the other.
That is the real cost of letting fear, rather than experience, decide who in your organization uses this well.
If you are leading your organization through this, this is the kind of work I do with a limited number of senior leaders each quarter. → https://anglero.com/the-reset/
Strategic AI Advisor, MerkabaPhi AS, Oslo. 450+ keynotes across 30+ countries.
Listen to the Clarity at the Top podcast on Spotify.
Inquiries: anglero.com