Kimberly Williams, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer, Absorb Software.
getty
I have spent my career building companies and developing people inside them. I grew up in a middle-class family where hard work was just how things got done. Nobody handed me a road map to the C-suite. What I had was a deep belief that if you outworked the room, kept developing your skills and delivered results consistently, the path would open. It did. And watching that same pattern play out in the people I have hired and developed over 20 years has only deepened that conviction.
That belief has held through every major technology transition I have watched. The organizations that come out ahead are never the ones that moved first on the technology. They are the ones that invested earliest in the people and culture required to actually use it.
AI is no different. In fact, the opportunity and the urgency has never been greater.
This is the moment that separates leaders who build durable organizations from those who manage declining ones. And the choice is happening right now, whether you have named it yet or not.
Teams running the same experiment, with the same AI platforms, same training budgets and same access, are getting wildly different results. The tools are identical. The outcomes are not.
The variable that explains the gap? The leader. Not the platform. Not the budget. Not the vendor. The leader.
Teams led by executives who model AI use openly consistently outperform teams where leadership waits for certainty. The leaders who go first create cultures that move. The leaders who wait create cultures that drift.
I say this not as an observer. This week I built my first app using Claude. I am not a developer. I am a CEO who decided that waiting to understand AI from the outside was no longer a position I could defend. I made mistakes, and I learned more in three days of doing than in months of reading about it.
Your AI strategy is only as strong as your willingness to go first. When leaders wait for certainty, their teams mirror it exactly.
The capabilities that create durable competitive advantage in an AI-accelerated environment are not primarily technical. They never were.
What I am hiring for right now, and what I believe every operator should be hiring for, is adaptability. People who ask, "How could this apply here?" before being told. People who redesign their own workflows without waiting for a change management initiative. People who are comfortable making high-quality decisions with incomplete information.
Gallup research shows that 51% of U.S. employees are actively watching for or seeking new roles. If your organization spent the last decade rewarding people for following process over people for solving problems, you are now facing a compounding disadvantage. AI tools require judgment, initiative and the willingness to experiment. If your culture has been selecting against those traits, promoting the people who color inside the lines rather than the ones who redraw them, AI will not save you. It will make the gap more visible, faster.
Seventy-five percent of companies are adopting AI, but only 35% of employees have received any AI training in the last year. Fifty-one percent of U.S. employees are actively seeking new roles. One hundred percent of jobs are changing—not some, every one.
The dominant AI conversation in most boardrooms centers on automation: What work can we remove, what headcount can we redeploy, where do the efficiency gains accrue? The organizations that combine AI-enabled operational efficiency with deeply human commercial capability will be extraordinarily difficult to compete with.
That combination is not a technology initiative. It is a talent strategy. And the window to build it with a real head start is closing.
Use AI to draft what each role on your team looks like in 18 months. Then sit down with your functional leaders and build concrete pathways to the skills that matter most. People do not fear change. They fear the unknown. Clarity converts anxiety into momentum. Do not delegate this to HR. Own it.
I took this seriously enough that I built an app to help leaders do exactly this. It is not a polished enterprise product. It is something I built myself, from scratch, because I believed the tool needed to exist and I did not want to wait for someone else to build it.
Only 22% of learning and development teams are currently included in AI strategy discussions. The function best positioned to build human capability at scale is being excluded from the decisions that define what capabilities are needed. Fix that this quarter. Not next quarter.
The fastest way to shift adoption culture is for senior leaders to use AI out loud, in meetings, in presentations, in decision-making, and share both what is working and what is not. Permission to experiment does not come from a policy document. It comes from watching leadership go first.
I am not always the most polished example of this. But I am a consistent one. That matters more.
The AI opportunity ahead is not marginal. It is generational. But it will not be captured by the organizations that bought the most sophisticated tools. It will be captured by the ones that built the cultures, hired the people and developed the leaders who could actually use them.
What changes is the cost of waiting. That work starts today. Not next quarter. Not after the next planning cycle. Today.
You already know which one you want to be.
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