If someone on your leadership team reads this week’s news about an AI researcher warning of existential risk and says it is time to slow down, here is exactly what I would tell them. Things have not become less certain. They have settled further in the direction of fear, and that is the opening, not the reason to wait.
Why is a competitor’s hesitation your opportunity?
A researcher resigning from a major AI lab with a warning about existential risk is real news, and it deserves to be taken seriously. It is also, for a leader, information. If your competitors read the same headline and hesitate, every week they spend waiting is a week you spend moving, and that gap does not close itself when they eventually start again. You cannot confirm that a competitor is slowing down. You do not need to. All you need to know is what you do with the next few months while the market around you is nervous.
What if we already tried AI and it did not work?
This is not a call to move recklessly. If your company invested in AI before and saw little to show for it, that was very likely not a failure of the technology. It was a failure of preparation, culture, and ownership. Leadership was not close enough to the work to know what good looked like. Nobody at the board level was accountable for the decision. Cutting the budget without understanding where the money went is the wrong lesson to take from that. Every one of those mistakes has already been made, publicly and repeatedly, by companies you can learn from without paying their tuition.
Why is now actually a better moment to invest, not a worse one?
You are not starting where the market started two years ago. You are starting with the benefit of everyone else’s lessons, at a point where the technology itself is improving faster than at any point since it became mainstream. The boards moving now are the ones who will own their AI outright, while the ones waiting for the fear to pass will still be renting it. The companies that treat this week’s fear as a reason to wait will spend the next two quarters catching up to the ones that treated it as room to move.
My honest advice for Monday morning: do not match your competitors’ hesitation. Use it.
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