Madison Chock & Evan Bates stepped off the ice last night in Milan believing they'd just skated the performance of their lives. 3-time reigning world champions. A decade-plus partnership. They lost the Gold anyway. The French duo that beat them ... Laurence Fournier Beaudry & Guillaume Cizeron ... had been skating together less than a year. They made visible errors. Wobbly step sequences. Messy twizzles. Yet, the judges still gave them the edge. "It's a subjective sport," Bates said. Hard to argue with that. Here's what stopped me cold (pun intended) Chock nailed it when she said through tears: "There needs to be some sort of judgment for the judges. So that we know we're getting the best from the judges & have a level and fair playing field." She's not just talking about figure skating. She's talking about Your company. Right now, most organizations are "judging" their AI transformation the same way Olympic ice dance judges score a free dance ... subjectively. Gut feel. Vibes. Someone in the C-suite says "I think it's going well" & everyone nods along. That's how you lose the Gold. Here's the pivot. When you're rolling out AI across your organization, you need to judge the judges. Meaning: who is evaluating whether your AI initiatives are actually working? What are they measuring? And are those metrics fair across every team? 3 things to do over the next week: (1) Pick one AI initiative in your company. Just one. Ask the person leading it: "How do we know this is working?" If the answer sounds like an ice dance score ... vague, subjective, open to interpretation ... you've got a problem. (2) Define what a "perfect skate" looks like before anyone hits the ice. The clearest signal of a broken evaluation system is one where the criteria get decided after the performance. Set your success metrics before you launch, not after. (3) Watch for the "French judge" problem. In the Olympics, people immediately questioned whether national bias influenced the scoring. In your company, the equivalent is the executive who champions a tool & then "evaluates" its success. Separate the sponsor from the scorekeeper.

You have them. In your organization. Right now. They're going to hold back your AI transformation. Here's precisely what to do with your AI Resisters.

The #1 thing you can do to safeguard your career right now? Invest 1 hour per day learning, experimenting with, and using AI tools. One. Hour. I know that sounds dramatic. But I've been recruiting for 30 years. Which means I'm old enough to have watched these tech waves roll through ... dot-com, mobile, social, and more. And here's what I've seen every single time: the people who are last to jump on the adoption curve often don't make it. Management Teams do the math. They look at the cost of driving behavior change in someone who's resistant ... and decide it's easier to just hire someone who already gets it. I'm no tech genius. Yet I can assure you the tools are far easier to use than you might think. You need not become an expert. But by now, it's clear that AI is not going away. Becoming proficient is the single best thing you can do to protect your (current) job & your (future) career. And if you happen to become excellent at it? Perhaps even enjoy it? Then, position yourself as an AI Champion within your department, your team, your company. You'll be seen as a leader. Looked to for guidance & expertise. 1 hour per day. That's it. p.s. If you're currently not working, I'd up it to 2 hours.

You may have seen this one making the rounds this week. It's a well-done analysis from the perspective of one man, who's knee-deep in AI. Even if he's only half right, the implications on your business, your career, and your team are as dramatic as you may think. Worth 10 minutes of your time: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

Today (Tues 2/10) at 1p ET / 12p CT / 11a MT / 10a PT See how one company actually planned & executed an AI transformation. I've lined up the company's CEO & the head of their AI implementation firm. Together, they'll walk thru what they did, how, the challenges they overcame, and how you can do the same in your business. Here's the Zoom link. See you there, Jeff