DEAR AI

AI is the defining leadership challenge of our time. The first thing it asks of you isn’t adoption, or governance. It’s a position. Here’s mine.

By Sue Cunningham, Founder & Principal Advisor - The Uncertainty Lab

People ask me what I think about AI all the time. And for a long time, I couldn’t give them a clean answer - which is a strange thing to admit, given it’s the thing I advise on. But the honest truth is that a clear position on AI takes a while to form. You have to use it, explore it, even struggle with it - and then sit with how genuinely hard some of this actually is.

Because the first thing this moment requires of you as a leader isn’t adoption, or governance. It’s a position - to choose where you stand.

Most of the leaders I talk to don’t - yet - have a clear position on AI. And that’s because a position is hard to form while you’re still coming to understand AI itself. It isn’t something you can sit down and write in one afternoon. It builds slowly, as your experience deepens - the more you use AI, the more you appreciate the complexity of the many choices it puts in front of you. And the clearer you become about how you’ll respond.

So what is an AI position, exactly? I define it as a set of choices every leader needs to make about how you work with AI. Where you’ll use it, and where you deliberately won’t. How you’ll let it change the way you work, and how you’ll keep learning as it keeps changing. These aren’t choices you can reason out from a briefing note or borrow from how you’ve always worked before. They come from deciding, consciously, how AI fits with your values, your judgement and your appetite for risk - and how collectively they come together into a set of choices that you can stand behind.

And the best way to build a position like that is to do the work yourself. Using AI on the decisions that actually carry weight and paying attention to what the experience teaches you.

So here’s my position. I call it DEAR, and it comes down to four stances: be deliberate, engage with your emotions, be agentic, be risk-aware. Each one is something I’ve arrived at by using AI - relentlessly - for the last twelve months - to build my AI-enabled business. And here’s what each one looks like in practice.

Deliberate.

I use AI deliberately - strategically, consciously, with intent. That sounds straightforward, but at times it can be one the hardest of the four to hold. Over the last few years, I’ve trained myself to reach for these tools wherever they help, until reaching for them has become the reflex. The reflex is efficient, but its also now a habit. I use my AI position to hold myself accountable. Every time I open an AI tool, I stop and ask why. What am I using it for - and am I using it to extend what I bring, or to spare myself the effort of bringing it? Sometimes, being deliberate means choosing not to use AI at all - deciding a particular piece of work is mine to do. The pause is the discipline. So - are you choosing AI, or is it choosing for you?

Emotions.

AI is personal in a way normal workplace change isn’t. It doesn’t just alter what we do; it reaches into who we are - our sense of our own worth, our professional value proposition, the things we’ve built an identity around. We need the space - and the safety - to work that what it feels like to live through the biggest change of our working lives. Ever since I stepped away from an executive career I have been on a roller-coaster ride of emotions -   genuine wonder at what these tools open up and, in the same afternoon, deep disquiet about what they might be doing to us, to how we think, to our kids and society and to the environment. Navigating change has always required us to navigate our emotions. Are you creating the space for yourself – and your team - to explore how you feel about AI?

Agentic.

This is the one I hold most strongly, because I’ve lived the truth of it. Across twenty-five years I’ve led through enterprise transformations, the Black Summer bushfires and one of the world’s longest lockdowns. They all taught me the same thing: you cannot lead others through uncertainty if you don't led yourself through it first. AI is no exception - it’s just bigger. Agency in uncertainty is the willingness to keep moving even though the way forward is unclear - and to trust yourself that you’ll find your way. How comfortable are you to lead into the unknown, and to reorient as you go?

Risk-aware.

You cannot work with AI responsibly without a clear-eyed sense of its risks. Everyone can list AI risks like confidentiality, security, competitive exposure. They’re real, and they matter. But being genuinely risk-aware means understanding the potential consequences of your use of AI, and the specific choices you are making about how you work with it. For me, the two risks I am beginning to watch more closely are cognitive overload – which is hard to avoid when you are  learning about AI, and using AI at pace - and cognitive surrender, the ever-present temptation to let the machine do the thinking for me. You cannot mitigate risks if you are not aware of them. Have you stopped to consider which specific risks you should be paying the most attention to?

So that’s DEAR, the four stances that underpin my AI position - today. And “today” matters - because an AI position isn’t something you build once and then use forever. It evolves - as AI capability keeps deepening, as your own experience grows, as your context changes. I have continued to refine my position over time as my experience has deepened - and I intend to keep refining it, deliberately. Building an AI position isn’t about getting to an “answer”; it’s about building a flexible, adaptive leadership position that you are willing to update in line with what changes around you.

Which brings me to you. Have you started building your AI position - making a set of considered, consistent, values-aligned choices about how you will lead yourself, and others, through this?

Because in the end, what will define your leadership in this era won’t be the policy you sign off, or the tools you roll out. It will be the position you build - which you feel comfortable to stand behind, to share with others, and which you apply in real life. That’s the quiet kind of authority this moment calls for. Not the confidence of someone with all the answers. The steadiness of someone who has done the work.

Sue Cunningham helps senior leaders and directors build the AI judgement, fluency and confidence to lead and govern AI well. She brings 25 years of strategic change leadership across health, aged care, international development and emergency management, AI strategy credentials from MIT Sloan and INSEAD, is a certified Coach and the founder of The Uncertainty Lab, an AI-enabled business. She publishes Inside Uncertainty and is writing a book on how to lead yourself and others through uncertainty.