What Changes When You Build Your Own AI Perspective
A Managing Director who had spent two years on his company's AI steering committee said it plainly: I know a lot about AI now, but I still do not know what I actually think about it. Information arrives already interpreted. A view of your own comes from using the tools on your real work, and it changes how every vendor proposal reads afterwards.
A Managing Director I worked with last year summed up the problem in one sentence.
He had been involved in AI decisions at his company for over two years. He had sat on the steering committee, read the briefings, approved the investments. And then he said: "I know a lot about AI now. But I still do not know what I actually think about it."
That distinction, between knowing about something and having your own genuine view on it, is exactly where Private AI Advisory starts.
The Difference Between Information and Perspective
Most senior leaders today have more AI information than they know what to do with. Conferences, reports, vendor presentations, internal roadmaps, business school programmes: AI content is everywhere and it keeps coming.
What is harder to find is a space to actually form a view.
A real perspective is grounded in your own experience, your own industry, and your own judgment. It does not arrive in a consultant's borrowed framework, in a vendor's recommendation packaged as strategy, or in an opinion shaped by whoever made the best presentation last Thursday.
The goal is knowing what you think, and that requires something different from reading another article or attending another session.
What It Takes to Build Your Own View
The most direct path to a genuine AI perspective starts with personal experience.
Before any leader can develop a real point of view on AI in their organisation, they need to use it themselves, in their actual daily work rather than in a demo or a controlled training environment. Using AI to think through a problem, research a situation, challenge their own reasoning, and get things done faster.
This sounds simple. The effect is significant. Once you have direct experience of what AI does well, where it falls short, and where it overpromises, you stop needing other people to interpret it for you. You have a reference point of your own.
From that foundation, everything else follows more naturally. Evaluating a vendor proposal, questioning an internal business case, holding a view on what your organisation should invest in and why: these conversations feel different when you come from experience rather than from briefings.
What Happens After
The leaders I have worked with through this process describe the change in different ways.
Some talk about feeling settled in AI conversations for the first time, because they know where they stand. They have a point of view. They can say clearly what they think makes sense for their company, and why, without waiting to see what the room thinks first.
Others describe a shift in how they engage with consultants and internal teams. They ask better questions, out of genuine curiosity and with enough grounding to engage with the substance. They find it easier to separate what is real from what is optimistic.
And many describe something more personal: a sense of having caught up with a part of their world that had started to feel like it was moving without them. They had simply never had a proper chance to engage with it on their own terms.
That, I think, is what building your own AI perspective actually gives you: a settled sense of where you stand, developed privately, at your own pace, in a space where the only agenda is yours.
Could you state your AI view in one sentence you would defend?
Private AI Advisory for executives and senior leaders at The Change Republic, working with leaders across Switzerland and Europe. Find out more at www.thechangerepublic.com/private-ai
Tünde Lukacs is an executive coach, AI advisory specialist, and founder of The Change Republic. She works with senior leaders on AI literacy, leadership development, and strategic decision-making across Switzerland and Europe.