"No one is harder on a talented person than the person themselves" - Linda Wilkinson ; "Trust your guts and don't follow the herd" ; "Validate direction not destination" ;

June 20, 2025

🧠 The Silent Killer of AI Adoption: Leadership-Level AI Illiteracy

The bigger problem of AI adoption isn't tooling or data, it's ‘AI illiteracy’ at the leadership level.

The kind of questions we ask reflects how much we know. And too often, the questions reveal a dangerous gap:

1️ Misunderstanding ML like software engineering

“I will give you 10 samples, can you build a model?”
“You have trained a model on this data, why can't you retrain it by each category?”
“You already have the architecture, isn't that half the job?”

In software, when you build an order placement API, it’s reusable, you can lift and shift it across regions.

But in AI, the model trained on one dataset doesn’t behave the same when trained on a subset.
👉 Data imbalances matter. Feature distribution matters. What works in one set may break in another.

2️ Oversimplified expectations

“Can we retrain the model every day?”
“Let’s schedule model updates at the end of each day.”

Nobody trains models every day. That’s not how MLOps, retraining windows, or data quality cycles work.

3️ Confidently asking the wrong questions
The kind of questions we ask reflects our AI awareness rate.
The problem isn’t curiosity, it’s confidence in assumptions without understanding the complexity behind them.

4️ Biases disguised as "opinions"
In many leadership discussions, I observe a mix of:

  • Strong opinions shaped by past software patterns
  • Lack of exposure to ML trade-offs
  • Forcing timelines and expectations AI can't meet,  yet

🔁 This requires unlearning, openness, and re-learning.
AI won't fail because it’s flawed. It will fail when leaders assume how it works — and miss how it actually works.

Let’s not just adopt AI. Let’s understand it.
A little learning, backed by humility, goes a long way.
Titles don’t validate assumptions. Understanding does.


#AILiteracy #AILeadership #AIAdoption #MLReality #AIExpectations #EnterpriseAI #TechAwareness #UnlearnToLearn #ResponsibleAI #AIThinking #AIProductLeadership #MLOpsReality #DataMatters


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