Friday, March 6, 2026
FRIDAY — AI FOR THE C SUITE
Read time: 7-8 min · Read online
Hi, it’s Chad. Every Friday, I serve as your AI guide to help you navigate a rapidly evolving landscape, discern signals from noise and transform cutting-edge insights into practical leadership wisdom. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Sound Waves: Podcast Highlights
This coming Monday, I’m joined by Dr. Sam Zolfagharian, President and Co-Founder of Yegatech and former Autodesk Silicon Valley AI lead. We dig into why your Microsoft Copilot investment is likely underperforming: top-down AI mandates produce disappointing employee adoption. She lays out the bottom-up task force model that actually fixes it.
Most executives think they’ve moved past the tinkerer phase. Dr. Sam says they haven’t. She’s spent five years categorizing how companies actually respond to AI, and the uncomfortable finding is that most mid-market leaders are still jumping from shiny tool to shiny tool without an organization-wide strategy. This episode reveals the specific warning signs you’re stuck and the one shift that gets you unstuck.
Hit one of the below links to check it out:
Apple · Spotify · iHeart · Amazon · YouTube
Subscribe for free today on your listening platform of choice to ensure you never miss a beat. New episodes release every two weeks.
2. Algorithmic Musings: Wax On, Wax Off: How to Actually Start with AI
Mr. Miyagi didn’t hand Daniel a black belt on day one. He handed him a sponge and pointed at a car. Sand the floor. Paint the fence. Wax on, wax off. The genius wasn’t in the tasks themselves. It was in where they led.
That’s exactly where most executives get AI wrong. They’re waiting for the black belt moment. Some grand strategic deployment that transforms the enterprise. Meanwhile, the real wins are sitting right in front of them.
Starting with AI doesn’t require a roadmap, a consultant, or a committee. It requires one honest question: Where in my work would it help to have a capable assistant available instantly?
That’s it. Everything else flows from there.
If that question still feels too open, here’s one framework (of many) I walk clients through when they need footholds. Think of it as a personal diagnostic: six lenses through which to examine your workday honestly.
Start with the grind. The lowest-risk AI wins almost always live in repetition. What do you do more than twice? What shows up every week feeling purely mechanical? What do you write in slightly different forms over and over again? These tasks aren’t glamorous, but eliminating or accelerating them creates breathing room for the work that actually requires you.
Follow the frustration. AI excels at removing the work nobody wants to do. What frustrates you most? What drains your energy before lunch? What sits on your to-do list for days because you keep skipping past it? The stuff you procrastinate on is often a perfect AI target, and unlocking it isn’t just a time gain. It’s a morale gain on top of a time gain.
Ask what you wish you knew. This one surprises executives. AI doesn’t just accelerate what you already do well. It can extend what you’re capable of. What skills do you wish you had on demand? What expertise would improve your decisions if you had access to it right now? What would you attempt if you had a researcher, analyst, or editor available around the clock? Think of AI less as a tool and more as an amplifier for capabilities you’ve always wanted but never had the bandwidth to develop.
Think about decisions that take too long. You’re not just a doer. You’re a decision-maker. And decisions require information gathering, analysis, and structured thinking. AI handles all of those. Where do you need better options laid out before you commit? Where would a sounding board help before the conversation gets real? Where are decisions getting delayed simply because synthesis takes too long?
Look at your communication. A significant portion of executive work is communication, and a significant portion of that communication is harder than it looks. What messages require careful crafting? What conversations need preparation? What explanations never quite land the way you intend? This is where AI earns its keep: getting language right and stress-testing it before it reaches its audience.
Finally, look at what you’re not reading. Every executive I know is swimming in information and drowning in unread documents. AI is extraordinary at extracting value from the pile. What reports never get fully read? What meeting summaries are incomplete or missing? What research would normally take hours to compile? The knowledge is already there. AI helps you actually use it.
None of this requires a transformation initiative. It starts with honest self-reflection about where your day actually goes. Walk through these six lenses and you’ll find more AI opportunity in your work than you expected.
The question isn’t whether AI belongs in your workflow. It’s which part of your workflow to start with.
Mr. Miyagi always knew the fundamentals don’t look like much at first. But they’re everything.
If you want to work through this diagnostic and identify your highest-value starting points, drop me a line. It’s one of my favorite conversations to have.
3. Research Roundup: What the Data Tells Us
Human-AI Collaboration: Your Team is Being Too Polite to Their AI Tools
Turns out your employees are treating AI like a junior colleague they don’t want to offend. Researchers from KAIST and the University of Michigan studied professionals working alongside AI agents and found the best results come when people freely interrupt, override, and restart AI work without hesitation.
The numbers that matter: Researchers tracked professionals across five distinct collaboration modes: full delegation, active monitoring, hands-on co-creation, verbal steering, and killing the task entirely. Most professionals defaulted to passive delegation or monitoring. The active intervention modes were used far less often than the research suggests they should be. That last category, killing the task entirely, should show up a lot more at your company.
What this means for your Monday morning: Most AI tools work like a vending machine. Request in, output out, start over if you don’t like it. That’s leaving productivity on the table. When employees can see AI working and jump in mid-process, they catch misalignment early and shape better outcomes. But only if your tools expose the process, not just the finished product.
The catch: Employees need to understand what AI can do before they’ll intervene effectively. Without that mental model, they default to passive watching. Budget for structured onboarding that builds realistic expectations, not just login credentials.
Action item: Ask your team leads one question this week: “When the AI gives you something 80% right, do you fix it or start over?” If they’re starting over, you’ve found a workflow redesign opportunity. Prioritize AI tools that show work-in-progress and let users steer mid-task.
4. Radar Hits: What’s Worth Your Attention
HBR: Deep industry research agents freed 65-70% of operations team time at PIMCO. Here’s the number worth pulling out: at PIMCO, 76% of the exception cases their operations team investigated daily weren’t real errors at all. An AI agent learned to recognize and auto-resolve them, potentially freeing most of the team for actual work. The lesson isn’t financial-sector specific. Ask your ops leaders what percentage of their daily workload is actually necessary.
OpenAI built a company-wide data agent with two engineers in three months. Now 4,000 of their 5,000 employees use it daily. It saves 2-4 hours per query and it’s built entirely on public APIs your team can access today. If your people are still hunting through spreadsheets or waiting on your data team for answers, this is what the alternative looks like.
MIT reviewed 30 AI agent systems and found most have no safety disclosures and no shutdown controls. Before deploying any agent into your operations, make this a standard procurement question: what’s your incident response protocol, and how do we stop it mid-run if something goes wrong? If a vendor can’t answer that clearly, walk away.
5. Elevate Your Leadership with AI for the C Suite
The six lenses in this week’s issue aren’t hypothetical. They’re the same framework I walk executives through when they’re ready to stop waiting for the perfect AI strategy and start finding what actually works in their day.
If you went through them and found more opportunity than you expected, or more questions than answers, let’s talk. A focused 30-minute conversation usually surfaces the one or two starting points worth prioritizing first.
And if you found this issue useful, forward it to one leader in your organization who’s still on the sidelines. The best time to start was six months ago. The second best time is Monday.
Stay safe. Stay healthy. Be strong. Lead well.
Chad