The CEO's Real Job During An AI Transition

Eric Giesecke is the CEO of Planet DDS.

​Most conversations about AI leadership tend to sound alike, with transformation road maps and bold predictions about what the organization will look like in five years. That language sounds impressive, but it skips past the part of the job that keeps me up at night: how we get there without breaking what already works.

The tension few leaders admit is that you have to build the organization you’ll need 18 to 24 months from now while still running the one you have today. You cannot pause operations to retool. Customers still need service and payroll still needs to run. As a result, you really need to do two jobs at once, and most days they pull against each other.

I think of it as renovating a building while people still live in it. You can’t tear out the plumbing and tell everyone to come back in a year. You’re rerouting water while the taps still need to work. That means running temporary lines so nobody loses service and telling residents which faucet to use this week and why.

In an AI transition, the residents are your employees and your customers. The work still has to get done today, even as you change how it gets done tomorrow. The CEO’s job is to sequence that change and protect what’s working while it’s being replaced, while keeping people informed enough that they trust the renovation instead of fear it. It gets harder once you factor in the people doing the work, because they don’t all move at the same pace.

People Move At Different Speeds, And That’s Not A Problem

What surprised me most, even after years of leading organizations through change, is how unevenly adoption spreads across a company. Give the same tool, training and deadline to five departments and you will get five different response curves. Some teams run with it immediately, while others need more time. A few will quietly work around it and hope nobody notices.