There’s a question we’ve been asking leaders lately, and it stops most of them cold:
What does the AI you’re using actually know about you?
Not what you’ve typed into it.
Not the prompts you lifted from someone else’s LinkedIn post.
Does the AI you rely on know what you actually value? What are you trying to build? What kind of leader, and organization, you’re becoming?
For most executives, the honest answer is, “Not much,” and that’s a problem.
You can’t give an AI a map of you that you don’t have yourself.
The Hidden Risk of AI Dependency
There’s a hard lesson that most of us already know – building your revenue on a single platform is like building your house on an active volcano.
Everything is fine… until it isn’t.
The algorithm changes. The platform pivots. Token costs double overnight. And the business you built on someone else’s infrastructure shakes.
We think it’s important to consider this lesson when it comes to AI and we need to consider it now.
Many of us are heading towards building workflows, teams, and in some cases, entire business models on top of AI systems we don’t fully understand, with providers we don’t control, using processes we’ve never mapped.
And so, leaders who’ve moved fast on AI adoption are sensing the discomfort.
We believe the answer isn’t to pull back from AI. The answer is to build smarter.
Carefully consider these three elements of your strategy:
- Agent Diversity: Don’t concentrate your critical functions in a single AI provider. Spread them across two or three. Make them compete for your business. Then if (when) one changes its pricing, its policies, or its capabilities, you’re not exposed.
- Sovereign Intelligence: Own some of what you build. This means defining and protecting the intellectual assets that make your AI efforts actually valuable. The model is rented. The intelligence you build into it shouldn’t be.
- Intelligence Diversity: Design your teams, both human and digital. Know where human judgment is irreplaceable. Know where AI is genuinely better. Build for both.
The combination of the three allows you to build as near “the volcano” as necessary without being consumed by it.
The AI Risk We’re Not Talking About
Here’s what most AI strategy conversations miss entirely: the problem isn’t only external. It’s internal too.
The leaders most at risk aren’t the ones with the wrong AI provider or the ones with a perceived lack of technological savvy. They’re the ones who’ve handed a powerful technology a poorly drawn map of themselves and their organization, and are now moving fast in a direction they
Here’s the thing: AI doesn’t just execute tasks. It learns patterns. Every interaction with an AI system is teaching it something about what you want, what you reward, and how you think. You are always training whatever AI you’re using how to treat you, whether you realize it or not.
If the interior work hasn’t been done. If there’s no clear articulation of your values, your actual goals, and the kind of leader you’re becoming then you can’t give the AI an accurate map to follow.
And an AI working from a bad map is, at best, an efficient way to go somewhere you didn’t choose.
It’s not a technology problem. It’s a leadership problem.
The Leadership Question That Changes Everything
The most important AI question isn’t which tool should we use?
It’s. “What do we actually know about ourselves, and is it enough to train a digital intelligence to help us become who we want to be?”
It’s a question that requires something most AI conversations skip entirely: self-knowledge.
Not the abstract kind. The operational kind. The kind that allows leaders to articulate what they value, what kind of work matters most, and what flourishing actually looks like for their organization.
The good news is that the map is buildable. The interior work is doable
Leaders who do it now, who combine the strategic discipline of AI adoption with the self-knowledge to direct it well, will have a competitive advantage that AI alone can never replicate.
That’s ground worth building on.
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This post is based on ideas explored in much more depth in our founder and CEO Jason Jaggard’s Substack, Your Noble Pursuit.
Your Noble Pursuit is where Jason writes about the intersection of ambition, meaning, and what it actually means to flourish, not just perform. If this post made you think, his Substack invites you to go deeper.
Looking for more AI-Ready Leadership Resources?
- The Beyond High Performance Podcast: Are You Training Your AI, or Is It Training You?
- Free Companion Resource: We created some guiding questions to help you continue the work from this episode. Download Your Free AI-Ready Leader Guide
- Work with a Novus Global Coach: Ready to explore what you’re actually capable of? Book a Free Discovery Call.
- Become a Coach: Learn more about the Meta Performance Institute for Coaching at www.mp.institute.