What Leaders Must Learn In The AI Age

Imagine you’re CEO of a successful accounting firm. You’ve just wrapped up another busy tax season—this time, without a hint of stress. In fact, things are going so swimmingly that you were just nominated for an entrepreneurial reward.

Life is good.

Predictable, too—just the way your analytical mind prefers it. You only breezed into the office today to finish up some last-minute paperwork. Right after that you’re taking your partner and kids for a well-deserved vacation to sunny Hawaii.

And then … your bubble bursts.

You get a dreaded email from your most important—and highest paying client. “We regret to inform you,” it starts. “But we will no longer need your firm’s services. Going forward, we will be using artificial intelligence to manage all our accounting needs in-house.”

Your stomach hurts. You can’t breathe. You picture all your big dreams for your company, not to mention, your whole life, and you think you’ll be sick. After all, this one client accounts for 47% of your revenue.

Without them, you won’t make payroll next month. You’ll have to let go of employees who feel like family. Without this client’s revenue, you won’t be able to pay your office lease either. Heck, without their business you might just lose your own business altogether.

This is a true WTF moment.

It’s also the subject of executive coach Danielle Sprouls’ new book WTF: Women That Flourish: Transform Life’s “What the F#$k” Moments Into Your Greatest Wins. Sprouls and I are collaborating on a sequel to it titled Master the P.I.V.O.T.—How Bold Leaders Turn Chaos Into Their Competitive Edge. A business allegory in the vein of The Go-Giver and Who Moved My Cheese, Sprouls created the WTF brand and P.I.V.O.T. framework to help businesses navigate a central challenge of our times: the uncertainty AI is producing for so many companies.

When I sat down with Sprouls recently to discuss so many of the fears I hear about in offices and boardrooms across the globe, she was quick to disrupt conventional thinking about chaos. “Uncertainty isn’t the enemy—it’s the birthplace of innovation,” she says. “But only if we stop treating WTF moments as panic buttons, and rather, as calls to action.”

Sprouls points to Barbie’s 2023 reinvention as a reminder that transformation doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. Once dismissed as outdated and out of touch, Barbie returned as a global phenomenon, driven by the success of a self-aware, culturally resonant film. Mattel didn’t abandon the brand—they reframed it. “They didn’t invent a new story,” Sprouls says. “They told the old one in a way people were finally ready to hear.” For her, the shift reflects how we’re also learning to use AI—not to erase what came before, but to reimagine how timeless ideas connect with today’s world.

Reinvention of the type Barbie represents is central to P.I.V.O.T. which stands for Pause & Prioritize, Identify the Opportunity, Vet Your Choices, and Take the Leap and Test. It reminds me of a different book meant to make sense of these unprecedented times—Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. At one point, the philosopher writes: “Change is the only constant. Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them.”

The fact that intellectual heavyweights like Harari are also devoting their attention to this issue makes it understandable that even popular culture is fixated on the matter of reinvention.1923 takes up the matter with Taylor Sheridan’s hit series starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.

Here’s some context. Much like us today, some 102 years later, the characters find themselves in an inflection point. You can see the old world converging with the new throughout the period show. Combustion engines share the street with horse drawn carriages. Meanwhile, the advent of electricity promises to upend daily life as forward-thinking people seek to power their homes and others reject technology as enslavement.

At one point, the show’s heroes, the Duttons, encounter a peddler selling modern conveniences when out for a pleasant stroll. The latter tries to sell the rugged rancher family on the utility of dishwashers to give them back time. But John Dutton, Sr. sees through the pitch. “Now here’s the thing: we buy all this stuff; we’re not working for ourselves anymore. We’re working for you.”

Shows like 1923 and Yellowstone, which it broke off from, are so popular in this moment because they tap into widespread fears. Today’s humans are once more wrestling with the push/pull dynamic between comfort and resilience and with innovation and irrelevance.

It truly is a WTF time.

And in order to greet it, we need to look inward, not outward, according to Sprouls. This means unlike John Dutton we cannot get overly focused on the whats in the marketplace. On any given day they can be any of the following: robots who learn to do tasks for you, AI-powered assistants, and now even self-driving flying vehicles from China. Yes, that’s real.

The point is, business owners like the accountant we started this article with, cannot halt technology’s inexorable progress. Daily, there will be more whats to boggle the mind. Or as Sprouls explains, “The hows are things we can control, starting with our own minds. Unfortunately, the story business leaders tell themselves about uncertainty is more paralyzing than uncertainty itself. That’s why the number one thing I do when working with clients is help them manage their own reactions to change.”

As one more analogous reference, the need to manage hows reminds me of great literature, in particular, Viktor Frankl’s searing memoir Man’s Search For Meaning. But first, as far as we know, humans are the only species that creates art. (Yes, AI is capable of producing it on our behalf, but it is not originating art.) Why might we produce art? Because unlike other creatures, we are capable of deep introspection. We seek to understand the changes around us, especially those that shock, dismay, and disturb us.

Like the fictional John Dutton, Frankl lived in a time of deep uncertainty. A victim of the Holocaust, he rightly realized he could not control his external conditions in the concentration camp where he was detained. The what. Instead, he looked inward, seeking to change how he met the moment. By seeking to control his reaction he empowered himself, managing to transcend his circumstances.

When it comes to business, we might not think in such existential terms—unless it’s our business on the line—encountering its WTF moment. Harari said, “All our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them.” I respectfully disagree. All these stories resonate. All these stories still have much to teach us in this time of upheaval.

Among other lessons, they suggest one more critical one—we are the ones who must change to meet the moment. “True innovation isn’t about erasing uncertainty—it’s about building the capacity to move through it with confidence, curiosity, and grace,” says Sprouls. Here’s to finding such strength within all of us to pivot—no matter what life throws at us in the coming years.