Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of organizations at pivotal moments—times when they’ve been searching for ways to renew, grow, and find a new direction. In every case, the same pattern has emerged: transformation doesn’t fail because of technology, but because capabilities can’t be developed at the same pace as the world around them changes.
We are now standing at the edge of a new shift. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool we learn to use—it is becoming part of the organizational workforce. Its role is expanding: it doesn’t just support work, but begins to learn, interpret, guide, and share expertise alongside people.
The Concept of Capability Is Evolving
Organizations hold enormous amounts of knowledge, but their actual capability often depends on individuals. Information is siloed, tacit knowledge disappears, and learning fails to spread.
AI changes this: expertise becomes shared capital. Its value is not automation or speed, but the fact that organizational capability becomes collective, visible, and distributable—and can be elevated to an entirely new level.
The AI Workforce as a New Layer of Capability
Real value emerges only when AI becomes part of an organization’s competence: a new layer that learns, shares knowledge, and helps execute strategy. You could call this the organization’s operational intelligence—an intelligence that runs securely on the organization’s own data and ensures that information turns into action exactly where it’s needed.
Often the first transformation is this: AI makes visible what the organization already knows—expertise that someone possesses, but which has never been fully utilized.
Leadership Is Tested in Capability Building
This is not a technological shift, but a leadership shift. The question is how quickly an organization can adopt a new kind of workforce while simultaneously growing people’s capabilities alongside it.
Leaders must be able to view capability as a whole—not just individual skills, but the flow of information, decision-making, and learning between humans and AI.
For the organizations that learn this, AI becomes a strengthening resource. And as in every transformation, the advantage goes to those who dare to build capabilities before everything looks ready.
