You don’t become AI-First by saying you are. You get there by learning faster than your competitors. Everyone has access to the same state-of-the-art models, but how to best use them is the alpha. Everyone is saying ‘this is moving too fast’ but slow learning is still the biggest competitive risk.
If you design your teams and systems for control, AI will break them. If you design for learning and adaptability, AI will supercharge them. Rigid hierarchies will slow down intelligence – human or artificial. Hire people who think in systems workflows and outcomes, not just those who can prompt code – a budget line for AI infrastructure means nothing if your team doesn’t understand what to do with it.
AI is reshaping job descriptions
While I lead a 200-person tech team, we’ve seen incredible transformations across all roles at our company just this past year. Our product managers are shipping code changes to production to millions of users, our design team is building working prototypes in code, the commercialization group is building interactive apps to drive sales readiness, our researchers are building their own instruments and our support team is training AI and Intercom to deliver answers in seconds, not days like our competitors. We don’t just have a faster team; we have a fundamentally different kind of team.