3 Moves to Make Today: Lead AI Transformation With Confidence

When we talk about AI, it’s no longer just a tech conversation, it’s a leadership one. 

The success of your AI transformation will come from how you lead your people through change. And in this moment of complexity, speed, and uncertainty, one truth is becoming crystal clear: organizations that focus solely on tools and infrastructure will fall short. The ones that thrive will be the ones that put people first at every step of the transformation. 

This is exactly what we explored in our latest episode of Momentum, "People Before Prompts: Leading Through AI." As AI becomes part of everyday work, leaders carry a new kind of responsibility to help their teams navigate change with clarity, care, and purpose.  

Here are three things leaders can start doing right now to drive AI adoption with confidence: 

1. Map your team on the adoption curve 

Every team has its innovators, early adopters, pragmatist, skeptics, traditionalist (see the Adoption Curve image below). So, treating AI transformation as one-size-fits-all may lead to confusion, lack of confidence and stalled progress.  

Instead, start by understanding where your people are at. Then design your approach to meet them there. 

• Identify who’s already playing and experimenting with AI. Let them lead low-risk pilots. 

• Identify who might be more reluctant to using AI and create "safe sandboxes" where it's okay to try, test, and learn. 

A survey by Wharton and GBK Collective, found that weekly usage of Gen AI nearly doubled, from 37% in 2023 to 72% in 2024. That shows teams are moving, but not necessarily in the same direction or speed. That’s why mapping your team on the adoption curve, helps you tailor the approach and meet them where they are. This helps you reduce friction, build trust, and turn early experiments into shared learnings.  

2. Align AI with your strategy and your values 

AI should accelerate what already sets your business apart. That means getting clear on your core: What are we here to do? What do we want to be known for? And how can AI help us deliver on that faster, smarter, and in a way that still feels human?  

As HBR authors Jay Barney and Martin Reeves argue, "AI won’t give you a new sustainable advantage. But it can amplify the ones you already have." Take General Motors for example, they’ve always had a digital tool to support with supply chain efficiency to minimize errors, and now they use AI to minimize errors. 

• Tie every pilot to a strategic or business outcome: clarity, efficiency, innovation, service. 

• Ensure experiments align with your cultural values. 

• Make ethical use of AI a team conversation, not a top-down policy. 

• Keep a human in the loop. Use AI to accelerate, not automate, critical judgement. 

3. Lead as a curator, not an expert 

You don’t need to know how to master prompt engineering or even every AI tool out there. As a leader, your responsibility is to guide your people through the ambiguity and new expectations of AI. That means supporting your team through the mess, so they can learn, stretch, and grow. 

This requires a balance of strategy and structure. Change should be facilitated in a way that feels possible, not punitive. 

• Curate conversations around what's working and what's not 

• Surface small wins and amplify learning 

• Model transparency, courage, and critical thinking 

  
  

Harvard Business Review notes that successful AI adoption doesn’t depend on having a single expert at the top, it requires a distributed model of leadership that encourages curiosity, shared accountability, and continuous learning across teams. 

Meet your people where they are 

You don’t need to overhaul your whole organization to make meaningful progress. Start with where your people are. Go from there. The rest will follow. 

At Sidekick, we’re helping leaders navigate these exact questions with their teams and within our own.  

And as Harvard’s Karim Lakhani puts it, “AI won’t replace humans. But humans with AI will replace humans without AI” The opportunity isn’t just to adopt AI but to lead through it with courage, clarity and care. 

Listen to the latest episode of Momentum “People Before Prompts: Leading Through AI”