Who is making decisions around AI in your Org?
what AI is exposing about seniority, decision-making, and who actually belongs in the room.
There’s a line in a piece i read this week that i haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
“the people with authority over how organizations adopt AI are the people with the least firsthand experience of what these tools can actually do.”
I’ve sat in enough rooms to know this is true, and i think the second-order consequences for enterprises are more serious than most leadership teams are willing to say out loud.
The traditional argument for seniority rests on three things: pattern recognition built over years, the ability to retrieve the right analogy at the right moment, and the judgment to know when to commit and when to hold. These were genuinely scarce skills for a long time, and they were scarce because building them was expensive - in time, in exposure, in the cost of being wrong enough times to learn something.
AI is compressing all three simultaneously, and faster than most senior operators have noticed.
A junior analyst who can generate five competitive positioning scenarios by end of day isn’t slower than the senior strategist who’s seen this before; a second-year lawyer who can surface every relevant precedent in minutes isn’t at the retrieval disadvantage she used to be; and a product manager who can launch, kill, and relaunch in an afternoon doesn’t need to spend six months building the case before she earns the right to try something.
What’s left, then, is the part of seniority that was never really about skill - the accumulated credibility that makes public wrongness expensive, the identity tied to past decisions, the unconscious filter that discards honest insights before they finish forming because the environment has trained you to run it automatically.
The enterprise implication is uncomfortable - most organizations are making their most consequential AI decisions through people whose daily experience of the technology is the furthest from the frontier. The CIO setting the AI strategy who hasn’t opened the tool, the CMO approving the roadmap who learned “openclaw” from a conference deck, and the CFO evaluating AI ROI using frameworks built for a different kind of investment entirely.
This isn’t an argument that experience is worthless - Real judgment (the kind that comes from having been genuinely wrong in consequential situations and having learned something from it) is still rare and valuable. But it arrives in the same package as accumulated aversion to risk, protected decisions, and the version of the story already told to the board. And i see it around - even the person carrying it can’t always tell which is which.
The organizations that will navigate this well are the ones that find ways to get their most experienced decision-makers into genuine daily contact with these tools - not demos, not summaries, not filtered briefings, but actual use. And the ones that create enough psychological safety for what a 22-year-old figured out in an afternoon to actually reach the room where the decision gets made.
The gap between the two groups is widening by the month, and the decisions being made in that gap are not small ones.