5 April 2025 governance / AI literacy / executives / edge
Why modern executives must become tech translators.
Predictive analytics. LLM hallucinations. Reinforcement learning. The boardroom has a vocabulary problem. With AI reshaping every part of the business, senior leaders cannot afford to speak only one language, especially if it is not tech.
Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse, 5 April 2025.
Most senior executives I know are excellent at translating between commercial, legal, regulatory, and people lenses. Very few are comfortable translating to and from the AI lens, and that gap is starting to show up in real decisions. Decisions about vendor choice, model risk, hiring, budget, and what to put in front of a customer.
The essay opens with a long lunch in Singapore, runs through the specific failure modes I keep seeing in board and exec-team conversations about AI, and lands on the translator role I think every modern executive is going to need to learn, regardless of function.