AI…the Great Boogey Man

5 Ways Leaders Can Avoid the FUD & Win with AI

The fear, uncertainty, and doubt around AI is off the charts.

The Silicon Valley hype-boys — the ones who run the big tech giants and flashy AI startups — are out here pitching AI as both the second coming and the end of humanity.

Their message swings between extremes:

• AI will revolutionize everything.

• AI will destroy us all.

And somewhere underneath it all:

“Please buy our AI products before they end civilization. Also, sorry.”

It’s a bizarre mix of marketing, panic, and moral theater — a desperate push to make their investments profitable while ignoring how anxious the rest of the world already feels.

That cocktail — hype, greed, and moral panic — is what’s fueling the AI narrative today.

Why AI Is So Confusing

While the hype machine keeps spinning, the rest of the business world is left trying to decode reality.

AI has become the new Rorschach test for every leader from CEOs to CTOs — everyone sees something different in it. Some see endless opportunity. Some see existential risk. Most see a blur they hope someone else figures out first.

Here’s how a lot of leaders are interpreting the big players in AI:

VCs

VC’s hear “AI” and smell gold. The narrative is driven by FOMO — the fear of missing out on the next OpenAI-scale win. VCs are driving the AI hype-machine more than anyone.

PE

They see AI as a lever — one that might cut costs, improve margins, and boost EBITDA multiples. But many are still figuring out where the leverage points area.

Large Enterprise

They’re moving slowly, like elephants tiptoeing through a minefield. Every AI idea has to pass through committees, compliance reviews, and risk mitigation working groups.

Mid-Market & SMBs

They’re stuck in the middle — too big to ignore AI, too small to afford real experimentation. Most are waiting for “off-the-shelf” AI to mature so they can just plug it in like SaaS.

Startups

Startups may amplify the AI hype, but they’re also the only ones moving the AI frontier forward. Innovation and exaggeration live side by side here.

Business leaders like CEOs & CTOs have a jumbled mess of all of this in their heads.

In fact, a CEO friend who runs a small business recently called me in a panic wondering why his team wasn’t doing anything with AI & whether they’ll get left behind.

He had no idea what the “truth” was about AI. Was it going to spell disaster or was it an opportunity for his organization? He didn’t know what to believe.

So many leaders are wondering the same thing.

AI Fear is Growing

Inside every company, anxiety about AI is spreading faster than understanding of AI.

The noise, the half-truths, and the “we’ll fall behind” panic have created a strange kind of executive paranoia.

And Boardrooms are buzzing with the same nervous questions:

• “Are we using AI the right way?”

• “Should we be doing more?”

• “Are our competitors already ahead of us?”

So the pressure is on.

But AI fear isn’t just about the technology or how to implement it. The biggest worries right now are about AI’s impact on the core fundamentals of business.

And leaders at the executive level feel it:

• AI will remake entire industries

• AI will destroy existing business models

• AI will ruin SaaS and even Services

• AI will wreck all competitive advantages

• AI will reduce company sizes to almost nothing

Now, these fears aren’t crazy but they’re not quite right either.

AI isn’t wiping out business overnight but it is shifting the ground beneath them.

Every company is being forced to reexamine whether all the work done in every department is necessary & which parts of it can be automated. The questions that used to be theoretical like “Could this be automated?” or “Do we really need this many people?” are suddenly much more realistic.

For decades, company GROWTH meant hiring more people, buying more tools, layering on more process, and expanding the org chart — it was all a measure of how much you could add.

AI flips that logic on its head.

Now, growth will come from subtraction. From doing more with less. From compressing what used to take departments 3 teams into a single intelligent AI workflow.

Subtraction is an uncomfortable inversion for most leaders because the very things that once signaled strength (size, structure, scale) are becoming signs of fragility in the world of AI.

Confronting the AI Boogey Man

AI isn’t something to fear, it’s something we all have to face. Because the truth is, this moment in the world doesn’t belong to the people who panic; it belongs to the ones who adapt.

The companies that win in the AI era won’t be the biggest, the richest, or the loudest — we’re already seen 10 person AI unicorns worth billions.

Instead the winners will be the ones that embrace AI and move quickly to use it on the right parts of their businesss.

Leaders like CEOs and CTOs shouldn’t see AI as a threat, they should see it as the ultimate pressure test. A once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild how we work from the ground up.

Here’s how to confront the AI Boogey Man if you’re a leader in or outside of tech:

1. Redesign for Leverage, Not Size

Use AI to amplify your best people and strip away unnecessary complexity either organizationally, in terms of systems, or process. Think about where in your org you can get the most leverage & use AI there extensively. Is it people? pricing? services? product? dev? Knowing where you’ll get the most leverage from AI is critical BEFORE adopting AI. The goal isn’t to get bigger; it’s to get faster and better output. Apply AI deliberately, not everywhere, and it becomes a force multiplier instead of just another expense.

2. Build the Right Culture

Fear of AI kills innovation faster than anything else. If your team is afraid of AI — afraid it’ll take their jobs, make them irrelevant, or expose weak spots — you’ll never get adoption, no matter how good your strategy is. The job of leaders is to replace fear with curiosity. Create an environment where people see AI as a tool for leverage, not replacement. Talk openly about it. Let teams question it, test it, even challenge its usefulness. The more familiar it becomes, the less mystical it feels. The leaders that win won’t be the ones with the biggest AI budgets — they’ll be the ones whose people aren’t afraid to use it, break it, and make it their own.

3. Don’t Outsource AI

You can’t outsource learning AI. I’ve already seen too many companies hand AI off to consultants, vendors, or agencies and expect transformation to magically appear. It doesn’t work that way. AI isn’t a product you buy — it’s a capability you build. Outside partners can help you get started, but if they’re the only ones holding the expertise, you’re essentially “renting” progress. The companies that truly benefit from AI develop internal muscle, like people who understand the data, the models, and the business context well enough to connect them together. You don’t want to everything AI related.

4. Empower Domain Experts Not Just Technologists

As a CTO it pains me to say this 😀 but you don’t need genius engineers to take advantage of AI. Great technologists help, but real impact comes from empowering domain experts in your company like in Sales, Finance, Ops, and HR to guide where, when, and why AI gets applied. These leaders understand the levers that move the needle on revenue, cost, risk, efficiency, etc and can be trained to spot the use-cases that matter. When AI is driven by those closest to the value, it stops being a technical experiment and becomes a business advantage.

5. Build a Data Spine

AI runs on good data so you have to fix that issue in your org. If your data is fragmented, duplicated, or trapped in silos, no AI will save you. Fix your data foundation first — it’s the backbone of everything that follows. Clean, connected data separates companies that experiment with AI from those that profit from it. Treat it like infrastructure, not an afterthought. Centralize what matters, standardize how it’s captured, and make it accessible across the organization. The quality of your data determines the quality of your insights, and without that spine, AI won’t deliver the value you’re looking for.

Closing Thoughts

AI isn’t the end of business as we know it — it’s the biggest opportunity leaders have had in decades to reimagine how work gets done, how value gets created, and how fast they can scale the impact of their organizations.

Yes, it’s disruptive. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But for leaders who lean in, AI becomes a competitive advantage. It levels the playing field when small companies can do things the big boys can do. It rewards clarity, courage, and creativity — not size, not legacy, not hierarchy.

This is the moment to rethink what your company is truly capable of. To strip away the noise, use AI, and lead with vision instead of fear.

The future won’t belong to the ones who watch AI happen; it’ll belong to the ones who use it to build better companies, better products, and better careers.