FEATURE when the machine is wrong, not celebrating when it is right.
Upskilling
Employees across organisations are speaking different languages about AI. Some think a £ 20-per-month tool can‘ enable the whole company’. Others are debating agentic systems, governance and model behaviour.
Bridging that gap requires structured learning, not occasional workshops. One suggestion was as practical as it was revealing – mandate a regular two-hour session for teams to learn, test and apply tools to real use cases. The goal is not to make everyone a data scientist, but to ensure decisions are made with shared vocabulary and realistic expectations.
There was also a sharper critique that in many organisations, HR remains focused on administration rather than capability building. Yet, in an AI-shaped workplace, HR becomes strategic by default. If the workforce does not evolve, neither can the organisation.
Fear, resistance and the real politics of change
Perhaps the most honest moments were about fear. Fear of job loss, fear of being exposed as behind the curve and fear of change itself.
AI transformation succeeds when employees experience it as empowerment rather than replacement. This happens through visible leadership, patient training, incentives that do not punish early mistakes and designs that make people feel included in the future, not left behind by it. One speaker insisted that employees need psychological safety and clear boundaries to engage with new systems.
From strategy to execution
If AI adoption is now inevitable, then we must move from strategy to execution. Across industries, the blueprint looked broadly consistent:
• Start with the process pain point, not the AI tool
• Build a sandbox to test without jeopardising sensitive systems
• Fix the data foundations so outputs have credible context
• Define guardrails and accountability before increasing autonomy
• Invest in shared understanding through structured training
• Scale only what delivers clear value in productivity, revenue, quality or decision-making
In the end, scaling AI you can trust is less about finding the perfect model and more about building an organisation capable of learning safely at speed. • www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO MIDDLE EAST
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