Is your business analog, not digital? Or put another way, anti-GenAI rather than leveraging Gen AI to improve your work processes and workflows? If so, you may not deserve the role of CEO. I’m reminded of my favorite elementary school principal, David G. David G. was a great guy, politically savvy, and while he could barely check his email (his secretary did it), he found ways to leverage technology for the benefit of students and staff.

He essentially modeled how to lead, even when you don’t know how to use the technology.

Today, we have leaders who don’t know how to use the technology and think they’re virtuous for not using the technology or bothering to learn it. They are the leaders of the herd that take it over the cliff into oblivion.

I guess that lead bison thinks it knows it is right up the point it smashes into the rocks below and gets crushed by those it tried to lead away from danger.

A Failure to Lead: CEOs Who Avoid Gen AI

Listening to The Artificial Intelligence Show #213 with Paul Roetzer this morning on my work commute, I found myself pondering his assertions that CEOs who aren’t leading the charge on Generative AI for their organization are missing the boat. Those who think Gen AI is a trap to avoid are doing a disservice to their staff and board members, stockholders, etc.

What Paul Said

That’s not an exact quote, more of a terrible paraphrase of the implication of a critique for no or slow action by CEOs regarding AI. For me, the right word is those CEOs and their organizations are headed for irrelevance.

Ah, here’s the quote:

So, I don’t know. I mean, I think a lot of times that’s the biggest barrier is just this lack of understanding and awareness, and then that leads to like. Lack of proper personalized training of how to use the tools. Some organizations, I don’t know about leadership pressure. I don’t know if that’s the right term.

I think leadership vision is probably a more important term where there’s this mandate from the top that we are going to figure this out. Like, we’re gonna become an AI forward organization. You’re going to become an AI forward professional. It’s expected of you. You have to be learning these tools. You have to be taking the courses we’re giving you access to, like, you have to level up yourself.

So I think it’s more about a vision and then sharing that vision about here’s where we’re going as a company, here’s what’s expected of you. Here’s how AI plays a role in all of this. yeah, so I , I don’t know. I think that it starts with vision. from the CEO, it ha, like, I’m a huge believer it has to come from the ceo and until it does then that organization is likely not gonna be realizing their full potential with ai.

As I sit in meetings with leaders of organizations, I’m disappointed to see how little people realize the benefits of Gen AI tools. Sure, it is brand new. Sure, there are big issues. But if you’re ignoring Gen AI, and your bread and butter is technology in [your field], then you’re going to be left behind. As Paul points out, slowing down simply isn’t an option.

My Jamboard replacement whiteboard, DrawSplat!, has started to show some real progress. More work is needed, but that’s my evening project after work…lots of fun!

Vibe-Coding a Solution

As I listened to Paul, he pointed out something that I’ve recently come to understand at a visceral level. Vibe-coding. Having prepared an online module on vibe-coding in Gemini, ChatGPT (including Codex at the CLI and Windows), Claude Code (CLI), not to mention BoodleBox, and coding DrawSplat! using my personal $20 a month ChatGPT account, I really see the possibilities.

Consider the graph creator that’s built-into DrawSplat above. That is an honest to goodness graph maker, something I’ve wanted ever since I introduced my third grade students to Graph Club from Tom Snyder a million years ago.

What’s more, it’s available in multiple languages:

It makes me ask, “Why the heck wasn’t this around for my students?” I mean, it even has a Vietnamese version, Arabic, Urdu/Hindu:

Or what about an animated GIF creator?

Or, an Emoji Mixer? Or Dot Pictures? Those features are already there.

These took less than an hour to add into DrawSplat! via vibe-coding at the command line with me asking ChatGPT (my personal Pro account), “Hey, what about adding an Emoji Kitchen style solution? Is that possible?”

So, when I hear people say, “Let’s go analog, no Gen AI,” I understand what they think they’re doing. But when you’re in a nonprofit organization or business, not leveraging Gen AI to improve your business isn’t a leadership strategy.

That’s just a #FAIL. I wouldn’t care, but you take down the whole company.

One More Example

Today, working on a big project, I leveraged Gen AI chatbot to create a Chatbot Project. Those I was working with asked me, “Aren’t you going to start putting this [project…what we were trying to create] together?” They were doing it the old way. I used Gen AI. No worries, they will learn to do it the AI way soon enough. They are willing to learn.

The time they spent discussing what would go into what we were doing and how they were going to organize it, I had already had Gen AI compile a list of items relevant to the [project], review them, and pull it to create a Project source file for the Knowledge Bank.

Then, I provided examples of what I wanted. Essentially an outline with source files, what slide decks should look like and contain. That took me about 20-30 minutes of thinking, organizing, asking the Gen AI what I wanted and coaching it on the desired results.

Ten minutes after that, I had two-thirds of the work we were doing completed (first draft). This is over a month’s work in an hour because I now know what to do.

Time savings? Huge, massive.

Return on investment? Well-worth my $20 a month payment to ChatGPT, much less $100 for Claude AI (for work).

Time to learn how to do this right? A year and a half. I didn’t see anyone else sitting next to me when I was figuring this out. Lots of reading, experimenting, learning.

If that kind of productivity isn’t convincing, I don’t know what to tell you. The question is, “Where’s the market for this kind of skill?”