Z.AI's culture mandates that technical leaders, including the founder, remain hands-on practitioners. The AI field evolves too quickly for a delegated, hands-off management style to be effective. Leaders must personally run experiments and engage with research to make sound, timely decisions.

To prepare for a future of human-AI collaboration, technology adoption is not enough. Leaders must actively build AI fluency within their teams by personally engaging with the tools. This hands-on approach models curiosity and confidence, creating a culture where it's safe to experiment, learn, and even fail with new technology.

AI is a 'hands-on revolution,' not a technological shift like the cloud that can be delegated to an IT department. To lead effectively, executives (including non-technical ones) must personally use AI tools. This direct experience is essential for understanding AI's potential and guiding teams through transformation.

Simply instructing engineers to "build AI" is ineffective. Leaders must develop hands-on proficiency with no-code tools to understand AI's capabilities and limitations. This direct experience provides the necessary context to guide technical teams, make bolder decisions, and avoid being misled.

Simply buying an AI tool is insufficient for understanding its potential or deriving value. Leaders feeling behind in AI must actively participate in the deployment process—training the model, handling errors, and iterating daily. Passive ownership and delegation yield zero learning.

It's nearly impossible to hire senior product or engineering leaders who are also fluent in AI. The advice for experienced managers is to step back into an Individual Contributor (IC) role. This allows them to build hands-on AI skills, demonstrating the humility and beginner's mindset necessary to lead in this new era.

Instead of passively learning about AI, executives should actively deploy a simple agentic product. This hands-on experience of training and QA provides far more valuable, practical knowledge than any course or subscription, putting you ahead of 90% of peers.

While senior leaders are trained to delegate execution, AI is an exception. Direct, hands-on use is non-negotiable for leadership. It demystifies the technology, reveals its counterintuitive flaws, and builds the empathy required to understand team challenges. Leaders who remain hands-off will be unable to guide strategy effectively.

CEOs who merely issue an "adopt AI" mandate and delegate it down the hierarchy set teams up for failure. Leaders must actively participate in hackathons and create "play space" for experimentation to demystify AI and drive genuine adoption from the top down, avoiding what's called the "delegation trap."