Quick summary:
- AI forces you to re-engage your mind in ways that challenge you more than most human colleagues, requiring active creative thinking rather than passive tool usage
- Leaders must learn AI at the same pace as their teams and abandon ego-driven assumptions about already understanding it
- Successful AI adoption requires removing fear from workplace conversations and framing AI agents as new colleagues rather than job-stealing threats
Annemie Ress thought she knew what cognitive challenge felt like. She’d worked at Skype, eBay, and PayPal. She’d managed technology shifts and organizational transformations. Then she started using AI.
“When you really actively work with AI and use it as a thought partner, your brain hurts,” Ress explains to host Greg Matusky on The Disruption Is Now. She realized she’d been mentally lazy without knowing it. The AI was exposing how complacent she’d become.
Ress now runs PurpleBeach, a consulting firm focused on what she calls “people innovation.” Her work centers on a premise most organizations haven’t grasped yet: AI transformation requires rethinking leadership, not just workflows.
Leaders need to figure out how to lead humans and agents simultaneously. They need to tell new stories about what work means. And they need to approach it all with an open mind and a willingness to learn.
Watch now:
Key takeaways:
Your brain needs the challenge AI provides
Most people treat AI like Google on steroids. Type a question, get an answer, move on. Ress argues that’s the wrong approach entirely.
When she started co-creating with AI rather than just querying it, her mind engaged differently. The AI challenged her assumptions. It asked provocative questions. She found herself thinking more creatively than she had in years.
AI done right forces you to articulate your thinking clearly, examine your assumptions, and consider perspectives you’d otherwise miss. Ress describes it as engaging “a different creative and inspiring side of my mind.”
Leaders who delegate AI learning will fail
Ress sees a dangerous pattern in organizations. Leaders assume AI expertise should bubble up from technical teams or younger employees. They treat it like previous technology shifts where they could stay above the details. It’s a mistake.
“Leaders are going to have to tell this story, find the story for their businesses of what the future of AI is and can create for their organizations and take their people along with them on that journey,” Ress explains. You can’t tell a story you don’t understand or lead a transformation you haven’t experienced yourself.
Leaders need to go back to school and understand AI’s capabilities and limitations firsthand. If they don’t stay current, they can’t evaluate risks and opportunities. They won’t know when their team is chasing dead ends or when outside developers are missing the business context that makes AI implementations actually work.
“It’s the age of learning. It’s the age of courageous leadership. It’s the age of goodbye ego,” Ress said. Organizations that figure out how to do that will run circles around competitors still operating under old leadership assumptions.
Fear is the real barrier to AI adoption
Ress believes we’re oversimplifying the AI conversation in ways that paralyze organizations. Doom scenarios dominate headlines. Employees hear “job losses” and shut down. Leaders see transformation requirements and freeze.
“Please can we stop being fearful and move away from all the negativity,” Ress urges.
She argues this mindset shift must come from leadership. “AI transformation will happen, but we have to be innovative with how we lead people, with how we equip them, with how we make them be prepared for this age of huge transformation and possibility.”
That preparation starts with removing fear from the equation. Fear shuts down learning by making people protective rather than curious. It creates resistance to the very tools that could let them do their best work.
Organizations need leadership that tells a different story, where the combination of human insight and AI capability creates outcomes neither could achieve alone.
Open-mindedness unlocks AI’s real potential
At a recent event, Ress brought together diverse leaders who didn’t know each other and had them work with an AI agent to discuss what a future-ready AI organization looks like.
Progress came fast. Decisions that normally drag for weeks happened in hours. The group made provocative statements and challenged each other’s thinking without anyone taking offense.
“The role that the AI agent played was actually to ask the provocative questions, but without anybody really taking issue, because it wasn’t personal,” Ress explains. The AI removed the social friction that normally slows down honest debate.
That experience points to a broader truth about what AI demands from users. You need genuine open-mindedness to extract value. Not the performative kind where you nod along in pretend engagement, but the kind where you’re genuinely willing to have your perceptions challenged.
Ress puts it simply: Successful AI adoption requires “an openness and a willingness to engage our own minds.”
Key moments:
- Why AI forces your brain to work harder than human colleagues (6:16)
- How AI has changed Annemie and Greg (8:39)
- The types of leaders blocking AI transformation (12:15)
- Leaders must go back to school and learn alongside their teams (15:19)
- Why assuming you understand AI is as dangerous as fearing it (19:56)
- Using AI to expose your own biases (20:36)
- How AI facilitates important debates (21:57)
- Energy demand as AI’s biggest unresolved threat (23:30)
Q&A with Annemie Ress
Q: How can AI help you do the best work of your life?
A: A lot of the things that are the monotonous, the boring, the grunt work that we all have to do, clearly that could be taken away from us.
But I think where the best work of our lives will come is where you can actually co-create new and better things with an AI agent working with you.
Maybe let’s not use something like a ChatGPT as a Google on steroids, but actually let me try and start using it as my thought partner.
Q: Why do leaders need to learn AI themselves rather than delegating it?
A: Leaders are going to have to tell this story, find the story for their businesses of what future AI is and can create for their organizations and take their people along with them on that journey. And this comes before we do any technology work.
Good leaders will take the time to just not just fall into the AI world, but actually say, what journey do I need to go on as a personal leader? And in consequence, what does this mean for me? What does this mean for the leadership team I might lead?
Q: What are the biggest leadership mistakes you’re seeing around AI?
A: I think at the moment you either have leaders who are extremely fearful of what is coming. Or you have leaders who think that they know what AI is, what it can do, the possibilities that it has. And I think while fear shuts you down, I equally think a little bit of arrogance and thinking I know equally shuts you down.
Q: How does AI change what leadership actually means?
A: Imagine leaders leading humans and agents, and leadership is going to be completely redefined.
And that’s where I come back to this notion of people innovation. The AI transformation will happen, but we have to be innovative with how we lead people, with how we equip them, with how we make them be prepared for this age of huge transformation and possibility.
Q: What’s your level of concern about energy demands from AI?
A: This is where I must say that I live in hope. I think the green shoots are there. I think we’re going to need a lot of more work in this space. As we stand today, I would say I’m extremely hopeful.
But I think that’s where we need many more people to engage with this topic. We need startups, innovators, creatives to really say, let’s start little companies, little businesses. Let’s tackle the future of energy, but also focus on this as a topic.
