The Capabilities That Separate AI Leaders From AI Followers

Hi Reader!

According to MIT's State of AI in Business 2025 report, 80% of organizations are already using AI. And yet 95% are getting zero return on investment.

I've been sitting with that number since November, when I started interviewing HR executives to understand what's actually happening inside organizations navigating AI transformation. Fifteen-plus conversations later — leaders across tech, financial services, healthcare, payroll, insurance, organizations from 150 to 220,000 employees — and that MIT stat makes complete sense to me.

Because the problem isn't adoption. It's who's leading it.

Most organizations are running AI transformation as a technology project. IT deploys the tools. Business units experiment. And HR — the function that owns culture, capability building, change management, and workforce design — is handling the operational support while the strategy gets decided without them.

One of the leaders I spoke with was Monica Duque, Head of People at Influur. Her two-person HR team spent last year automating nearly everything in their department. They ran company-wide AI challenges — non-technical employees, two weeks, going from "I opened n8n and got a headache" to presenting their own built tools on a Friday. They tracked hours saved, correlated it to headcount, and by December the company closed the year with ten fewer roles than planned. Not from layoffs. From capacity created through what HR had built.

When the board asked why, the answer was HR.

And that's exactly how Monica got her seat at the strategy table. Not by asking for it. By making herself impossible to leave out.

"Never, never say invite me," she told me. "Drive the process yourself."

What separates HR leaders who are actually shaping AI strategy from those still waiting on the sidelines comes down to a few things: they learn the tools themselves, they translate impact into numbers the CFO and CEO understand, and they move before they have permission. The cultural transformation, the reskilling, the governance, the human cost of getting this wrong — none of that gets managed well without HR in the room from the start.

The organizations that figure this out are going to have a significant advantage. The ones that don't are going to keep wondering why their AI investments aren't paying off.

I spent the last five months pulling this research together into a report. The State of HR in AI Transformation 2026 covers the current state — where HR is involved, where it's being left out, and why — alongside a practical competency framework for building AI-ready teams, drawn from the CLICK Model. It's built on real interviews, real data, and real examples from leaders who are already making this work.

If you're an HR or people leader trying to move from operational supporter to strategic architect in your organization's AI journey, this is for you.

Download the report

And if you want to hear Monica's full story — including her framework for company-wide AI challenges and what she calls the secret recipe for transformation that actually lasts — the episode is live now on Built by People Leaders.

See you next week.

Daria

P.S. Forward this to an HR leader in your network who's navigating AI transformation. The report is exactly the kind of thing that makes that conversation easier.