For a while now, my advice has been pretty simple: pick an LLM, start using it on work you already do, and see what's possible. Don't wait for a strategy, or a policy, or until you fully understand the technology. Just start.

However, the math on all that has now changed (see this piece) and the cost of waiting is no longer theoretical. In fact, it's starting to show up in the places that matter most.

Last week, Wharton professor and AI researcher Ethan Mollick published a piece called "The Shape of the Thing," in which he mapped where we are in the AI adoption curve with unusual clarity. What caught my attention wasn't the capability data, impressive as it is. It was his conclusion. After laying out the exponential gains in AI performance, the emergence of autonomous AI agents, and the radical organizational experiments already underway, Mollick observed that "every organization figuring out a good way to use AI right now is setting a precedent for everyone else." He added that the window to shape how AI gets used—in organizations, in industries, in markets—is open right now, but it won't stay that way indefinitely.

That's the part I want to talk about. Because most leaders are still treating the window like it's wide open and will be for a while.

But the reality is: it won’t be.

Your AI Position Is Being Decided — With or Without You

What I keep coming back to when I work with leaders across industries is this: the competitive landscape probably hasn't changed dramatically on the surface. Your competitors are mostly the same companies they were two years ago. You probably see the same players, in the same markets, with the same basic dynamics. And yet something important is shifting underneath all of that.

Some of those very same competitors have started experimenting with AI—not in a performative way, not just putting a chatbot on their website—but actually rethinking how they operate. They're learning which workflows AI can own. They're discovering where it breaks and where it doesn't. They're getting faster, sharper, and more efficient in ways that don't show up on a quarterly report yet. But they will.

You don't know what they're learning—and that's the part that should make you uncomfortable.

This is what makes the current moment different from the typical "adopt or fall behind" technology narrative. Disruption is usually visible. You can watch a competitor launch a new product, make an acquisition, or hire a hundred people. Those moves are announced and we all see them. What's happening right now with AI is largely invisible. The learning is happening quietly, inside organizations, in experiments that never get press releases. And when that learning turns into operational advantage—when a competitor can do in two hours what takes your team two days—the gap becomes visible all at once. By then, it's much harder to close.

But this isn't a timing question. It's actually a positioning question. Your position in the AI era is being decided right now, whether you're deciding it or not.

What Strategy Actually Looks Like From Here

The organizations that are pulling ahead are being intentional. They've named where AI creates leverage in their specific business, and they're building toward it with some deliberateness. That's the difference—not the tools they're using, not the budget they have, but the decision to actually have a posture.

For leaders who are still in the early stages, or haven't started at all, that posture doesn't require a massive transformation initiative. It requires getting specific. Where in your business does speed matter most? Where does accuracy? Where are your people spending time on work that could be augmented or automated, freeing them up for the judgment-intensive work only they can do? Those aren't rhetorical questions. They're the foundation of a real AI strategy—one that moves you from "we're looking into it" to "we know where this makes us better."

The organizations that figure this out first are building institutional knowledge that compounds. They're developing internal capability that takes real time to develop. And they're establishing the kind of competitive muscle that, once built, is genuinely hard to replicate quickly.

Mollick ends his piece by noting that we can still influence the shape of the Thing—but the window to do so won't last long. I'd add this: the window isn't just about shaping AI broadly. It's about shaping what AI looks like inside your organization, your team, your market. That's a narrower window, and it belongs specifically to you.

So here's the question worth sitting with today: while you're waiting for the right moment to make a move on AI, what exactly are you waiting for? The technology isn't going to get simpler. The competitive pressure isn't going to ease. And your competitors aren't going to stop learning.

The window is open. The question is whether you're walking through it.