Your competitors are doing this – are you?

This quarter, you also need to do something that almost no employer has done: update your performance review framework. If you are asking people to work differently with AI but still measuring the same inputs — hours logged, volume of output, processes followed — you are sending contradictory signals. An employee who uses AI to accomplish in ninety minutes what previously took a full day is either your top performer or your next departure, depending on how your system reads that result. Reward thoughtful, effective use of AI. Build it into promotion criteria. If you do not, the employees most capable of leading your AI transformation will take those skills to an employer who will.

Starting today: stop spectating

There is one intervention that has an outsized effect on AI adoption within organizations, costs nothing, and requires no technology budget. It is leadership role-modelling, and most Canadian senior leaders are not doing it.

McKinsey’s research on AI high performers found they are three times more likely than their peers to have senior leaders who actively demonstrate ownership of and commitment to AI – not in board presentations, but in how they actually work. When a leader uses an AI tool in their own practice, talks about what they tried and what surprised them, shares a result that saved them two hours on a task they used to dread — they give the entire organization permission to do the same. When that same leader discusses AI at every town hall meeting but visibly never uses it themselves, the gap is noticed.

You do not need to become a technical expert. You need to become a visible learner. Open an AI tool today. Use it for something real – a briefing note you need to prepare, a piece of market research, a board deck section you have been putting off. Notice what it does well and where you needed to push back. Tell someone on your team about it tomorrow. That is the first step. It is available to you right now, it costs nothing, and it matters more than most of the things on your agenda this week.

The governance you cannot afford to skip

Moving fast on AI without building governance alongside it is how organizations create liability, not advantage. IBM Canada’s shadow AI data makes this concrete: unsanctioned AI use is already costing Canadian businesses an average of $308,000 per data breach. That number will grow.