The AI Hire

Spoke to a founder recently who had just made her first AI-specific hire. Head of AI. Someone with a proper background in it, hired from outside the agency world, with a clear brief to accelerate adoption across the business.

Three months in she was having doubts. Not about the person, who was good, but about the role. He'd spent most of his time trying to get teams to change how they worked, and most of the teams weren't interested. The designers had their own tools. The strategists had their own workflows. Everyone was polite about it but nothing was really moving.

When I asked what he'd been doing, it was mostly training sessions and tool evaluations. Good things to do, in principle. But none of it was connected to what the teams actually needed to deliver that week. He was selling the future to people who were trying to survive the present.

The thing that changed it was reframing the role entirely. Instead of pushing tools and training, he started sitting with individual teams and asking what was taking too long or costing too much. Then he'd build something, usually quite small, that addressed that specific problem. A brief template that pre-populated from a client's previous campaigns. A research workflow that turned a two-day task into a two-hour one.

Within a couple of months the teams were coming to him rather than the other way around. Nobody had to be convinced of anything because the work was doing the convincing.