Hi, it's James Taylor here, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation and artificial intelligence. Last year, I spoke to leaders of companies and countries right across the UAE, the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Singapore and in Europe. And what is really interesting is the most revealing conversations around AI really happened on the stage. They happened in the green rooms, backstage, over coffee between sessions, quiet conversations with global CEOs, board members and...

other AI keynote speakers where the public optimism drops and the real questions start to emerge. And when you strip away the slide decks, the demos and the buzzwords, this is what I'm hearing at the moment. It's not about what AI is anymore. That was two years ago. It's about how leaders are redesigning the organizations, their teams, their decision-making, their value creation in this kind of AI augmented world. And that shift is changing everything.

When I first started speaking on AI back in 2018, almost every talk began with the same questions. What is AI? What can it do? What can it do? And should we be excited or terrified? Back then, that made a lot of sense. Most audiences were encountering AI for the first time. So my job as a speaker was largely about translation, demystifying the technology, separating science fiction from reality. Fast forward to today and something interesting has happened. Very few leaders ask, what is AI?

What they ask instead is this, how do we need to change our people, our playbooks, our processes in a world where AI is everywhere? And that shift tells us something important about where we're really heading on this AI journey. Now, the first phase of any major technology wave is always educational. What is it? How does it work? Why does it matter? That was a phase we were in around 2018, 2019, even perhaps early in the pandemic years. AI was a topic. It was a slide deck, a future trend.

Today, AI is no longer a topic, it's an environmental, it's a way of working. It sits quietly inside tools with your teams are already using. It shapes decisions without always announcing itself. It influences speed, quality and direction of work, which means the leadership challenge has changed. Now, these are the real questions that leaders are asking today. The conversation I have with CEOs, boards and senior leadership teams now tends to revolve around five much deeper questions and none of them are technical.

in nature.

So first question is how do we redesign our organizations for this AI world that we're living in? Most organizations are kind of still structured in a pre-AI world. Their roles are fixed, decision rates are rigid, processes assume that humans are doing all the thinking. But in an AI augmented world, the organization itself becomes a design challenge. Which decisions should be supported by AI? Which ones should remain deeply human? Where does accountability sit?

when insight comes from a machine, but judgment comes from a person. This is not a technological problem. This is an organizational design problem. Second question I get is how do teams actually collaborate with AI? Now for a while, we talked about AI as a tool. Then we talked about AI as a co-pilot. Now the more useful framework is AI as a collaborator. That raises new questions for leaders. How do we design teams where humans and AIs work together without humans disengaging or over trusting the system?

How do you avoid skill atrophy? How do you stop automation from quietly eroding judgment? This is about collaboration, not computation. Third question I'm hearing from leaders is how do leaders make decisions in an AI rich world? This is things start to get a bit uncomfortable because when AI becomes very good analysis, prediction, pattern recognition, leaders can be tempted to outsource their thinking. But leadership is never really about having the most information. It's always about sense making.

knowing when to trust the data, knowing when to challenge it, knowing when the model is right, when the moment is not quite happening. In an AI augmented world, judgment becomes more valuable, not less. Fourth question I'm hearing from leaders is how is value actually created now with AI? In the early days, AI was sold as an efficiency story, faster, cheaper, more automated. But efficiency is a short-term advantage. Long-term value comes from imagination.

framing, the ability to ask better questions in your competitors. When everyone has access to the same AI tools, value shifts upstream to problem definition, to taste, to strategic choices. AI does not replace creativity. It commoditizes the easy part and amplifies the hard ones. Fifth question I hear from leaders is, what does leadership even mean now? You know, this is the quiet question that sits underneath all of the others. When your expertise is augmented,

when answers are cheap, when prediction is automated, what is the leader's role now? Increasingly, it's not about being the smartest person in the room. It's about creating clarity, about setting direction. It's about designing the right conditions in your organization so creativity can flourish, so your people can unlock their true human creative potential. And a lot of this is also really about thinking about the values, but it actually becomes more important

in this age of AI. Because when making decisions, when the data is incomplete and uncomfortable, you kind of have to start to move to thinking really about values and principles. They have to be much more embedded in the organization. See, AI is going to change how work is getting done. It's already doing that now. But it does not remove the need for great leadership. It actually just raises the bar. And this is why I believe all of this matters right now. Whether this AI hype

cycle continues, or whether we see a correction, the shift is going to be permanent. Even if investment starts to slow, the markets have a wobble, even if the headlines change, the deeper questions remain. How do humans lead, create, and collaborate in a world where intelligence is no longer scarce? That is the conversation that I'm having today with leaders. And that is why my work has evolved from explaining AI to helping leaders redesign how their organizations think and work. So if you're a leader,

listening to this, here is your invitation. Stop asking what AI is. Start moving on to the higher level questions. Start asking what kind of organization do we need to become? What kinds of decisions do we need to protect? What kinds of creativity do we want to cultivate? And what kind of leaders does this moment really require? Because AI is not the strategy. How you lead with it is. Thanks for listening to the Super Creativity Podcast.