Conquering the AI Step: Unleashing Transformational Growth for the Organisation

The AI Step: A Reckoning for Leaders

In September 2022, a moment of quiet panic swept through the corporate boardroom of a global media company. AI wasn’t just another tech trend—it was a wrecking ball aimed squarely at the way businesses operated. And it wasn’t just media companies—other fast-moving industries like finance, technology, and retail were facing the same pressure to adapt or be left in the dust. The message was clear: If these companies didn’t upskill in AI within a year, they’d be roadkill.

So they did what corporations do when they hear a crisis coming — they threw money at it. AI investments skyrocketed.

"41% of employers expect to downsize by 2030 due to AI" — Future of Jobs Report 2025, World Economic Forum

Teams have been slashed in half, but the expectations? They stayed right where they were. Productivity was the promise, but the reality was something messier. AI, as it turned out, didn’t just streamline work; it rewrote the rulebook entirely. The real challenge wasn’t learning new skills—it was thinking in a fundamentally new way.

And here’s the rub: Most organizations aren’t built for that kind of reinvention. But the ones that figure it out? They win.

Imagine shattering the stifling silos that hinder progress, liberating the boundless potential that lies within the organisation. - Senior leader from a regional Bank in Asia.

The AI Step: The Death Zone of Business Transformation

Near the top of Mount Everest, there used to be a jagged, nearly vertical rock face called the Hillary Step. Climbers would reach it exhausted, oxygen-starved, and confronted with the reality that success wasn’t guaranteed. The ones who didn’t have a strategy turned back. The ones who did? They made history.

The AI Step is today’s Hillary Step. Companies don’t get to opt out; they only get to decide how they’ll face it. Some are fumbling for footholds. Others are moving fast, leveraging AI to scale up productivity, collapse management layers, and force new ways of working.

But here’s where the metaphor gets interesting: Just like on Everest, where climbers innovated their way past the Hillary Step, businesses must rethink how they navigate the AI Step. And fast. News about DeepSeek shows us there are less painful and less costly pathways opening up. The opportunity is real.

The Reckoning: Where AI Hype Meets Hard Reality

At first, AI seems like a next-day delivery—effortless, fast, and ready to go. It would automate the drudgery, slash costs and drive growth on autopilot. For a brief moment, it looked like the future had arrived like an Amazon package on the doorstep, ready to be unboxed and deployed.

Then the cracks appeared. AI doesn’t eliminate complexity — it brings it into stark relief. And according to a senior tech leader, "AI is expensive as f@ck." To save costs, middle managers - often dismissed as bureaucratic dead weight, the "frozen middle" - were cut en masse. Removing them, it seemed, would clear the way for progress. On paper, it looked brilliant. In practice, it was anything but.

AI doesn’t eliminate complexity — it exposes it.

It turned out middle management weren’t just layers of inefficiency; they were the connectors. They held the unspoken wisdom of how things actually worked — nuances no algorithm could capture. They connected the lofty ambitions of senior leaders to the ground-level realities of employees. Without them, the corporate machine began to sputter, decisions stalled, and wisdom disappeared. The powerful AI lacked the human intuition needed to navigate gray areas or anticipate ripple effects. One digital marketing team was wiped out overnight, replaced by an AI bot that churned out mountains of content at superhuman speed — except most of it was junk. Without a human to sift through the mess, the result wasn’t efficiency, just an avalanche of noise. What had been framed as "streamlining" began to look more like unravelling.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them. - Edumund Hillary.

Rebuilding the Bridge: The New Role of Leadership

The solution isn’t to bring back middle management as it was. It’s to reinvent it. The best companies are doing exactly that—training managers to become enablers, not bottlenecks. These are the new bridge-builders, ensuring AI isn’t just bolted onto existing legacy workflows but completely reinventing how work gets done. They are the ones who can guide AI's integration while safeguarding the institutional knowledge and culture that make progress sustainable. After all, banks won't lose their business to a chatbot; they'll lose it to other banks who harness the chatbot more effectively to achieve world-class performance.

I like to think of AI as a brilliant ally at work but with a slight drinking problem. It’s incredibly sharp — until it isn’t. Keep a close eye on it, or before you know it, you’re both on an all-night bender with no idea how you got there.

The Key Shifts

Customers Demand Instant Gratification: Once upon a time, approvals took forever. Layers of management, endless deliberations, and a backlog up the wazoo. Customers waited. And waited. And sometimes just gave up. Then, AI walked in and rewrote the rules. Automation and flatter hierarchies turned red tape into real-time decisions. Banks used to take days to approve a loan — now it happens in seconds. No one’s filling out forms, waiting on a manager, or checking a fax machine. The game has changed. Customers won’t wait, and neither should businesses.

New Productivity Benchmarks: Once, the formula was simple: more people, more output. Need to get more done? Hire more bodies. But AI rewrote the math. Now, lean teams armed with smart tech outpace bloated departments, not by grinding harder, but by working smarter. The old headcount game? It’s over.

Winning Cultures: The old playbook was simple — keep things steady, follow the process, and don’t rock the boat. Predictability was the gold standard. But in a world moving at machine speed, stability is just another word for stagnation. The best cultures don’t resist change—they ride it, shape it, push it forward. Employees adapt on the fly, spotting opportunities before they become obvious. AI isn’t the enemy; it’s the edge. The winners? They don’t wait for change to happen. They make it happen.

Bridging Generational Gaps: The senior directors built their careers on hierarchy and decorum. The new hires? They grew up with Discord. One side values structure; the other values speed. The leaders who get this — who speak their language, who trade top-down commands for real dialogue—will earn their loyalty. The ones who don’t? They’ll keep talking, but no one will be listening.

Reinventing Budgeting: Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) forces organizations to justify every dollar, every quarter, every year—no sacred cows. It’s a radical shift that aligns perfectly with AI’s efficiency mandate. Companies that master ZBB aren’t just cutting costs; they’re reallocating resources to where they create the most impact. But it requires a mindset shift — leaders must stop defending past spending and start articulating the vision to justify future value.

From Order-Takers to Owners: The old game was simple — do as you’re told, follow the process. But in an AI-driven world, waiting for top-down instructions is a losing strategy. Organizations don’t need more task-doers; they need owners — people who thrive in ambiguity, make tough calls, and drive outcomes. Success now belongs to those who embrace complexity, not avoid it.

The Risk of Standing Still

In high-altitude mountaineering, there’s a brutal rule: The longer you stay in the death zone (above 8,000m), the faster your body deteriorates. There’s no waiting around for conditions to improve. The same holds true for companies navigating AI disruption.

The game has changed. Hierarchies move too slow, rigid processes break under pressure, and waiting for instructions is a losing bet. Do nothing, and you don’t just stagnate—you slip and get relegated to being a 2nd or 3rd-tier player. If AI isn’t accelerating your impact, it’s being used by someone else to outpace you. The risk isn’t AI itself; it’s standing still while others embrace it.

The best companies know it’s not enough to have a strategy—people have to own the change. They need to feel it in their bones - make it personal. That’s where we come in. We help organizations scale impact by aligning personal vision with company goals, turning employees into decision-makers, not just task-doers.

The Impact Wall is a living snapshot of the people who make it all happen, illustrating how individual talent, aligned with the bigger picture, powers the organisation. More than a display, it’s a strategic tool to drive alignment, motivation and lasting change.?

The Real AI Play: More Than Survival

In 2015, a Nepal earthquake destroyed the Hillary Step. Climbers had to rethink their approach, but the mountain didn’t disappear. It just demanded new strategies.

AI is the same. It has shattered old ways of working, but the game hasn’t changed—winning still belongs to those who adapt fastest. The organizations that will thrive aren’t just those that deploy AI, but those that rewire their thinking. Transformation begins not with technology but with people. It thrives in the spaces where personal impact meets organizational alignment. And it demands leaders who see not just the summit but the humanity in the climb.

Because the real measure of progress isn't how fast you scale the mountain—it's how many people you can bring with you to the top.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn't the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges. - Edmund Hillary

If you're curious to learn more about accelerating your people through transformation, drop me an email [email protected]

At Personna, we’ve been rethinking how impact really works. Since 2010, we’ve been helping ambitious leaders and their teams to scale strategic impact by aligning their personal vision with corporate objectives.