Defining the AI-Amplified Leader
The Five Levers That Turn Dabblers into Directors
This spring, Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, issued a directive to his 8,000 employees that sent shockwaves through the business world.
Key quotes in the memo:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.
The prototype phase of any project should be dominated by AI exploration.
Using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by… using it a lot.
You have access to as much of the cutting edge AI tools as possible.
We will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire.
Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.
Everyone means everyone. This applies to all of us—including me and the executive team.
Bold? Absolutely. But soon this will all be table stakes.
Every company will have a similar policy as it relates to AI, or they will be out maneuvered.
As Peter Diamandis says “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.”
The crazy idea here is not that Tobi Lütke is telling all his employees to fully embrace AI. Everyone should already be doing that, right?
What’s interesting is the last point he made, which is that this memo also applies to
“me and the executive team.”
Because while 97% of leaders say AI implementation is urgent for their organizations, most executives and managers are still treating AI like it’s someone else's job.
They're delegating AI adoption to their people while remaining dabblers themselves—asking for AI strategies without using AI for their own tasks, demanding AI results without developing AI fluency.
How can you lead a revolution you haven’t joined?
What if the real AI progress isn't happening in tech labs or research papers, but in the quiet moments when leaders decide to transform themselves first?
What if the future belongs not to companies with the best AI technologies, but to the organizations led by AI-amplified leaders like Tobi Lütke?
The stakes couldn't be higher.
Those who master this transition will define the next decade of business. And those who don't will spend it playing catch-up.
Why Smart Leaders Are Falling Behind
Many managers are stuck in the "delegation trap."
They approach AI like enterprise software projects—as an IT initiative to manage rather than a capability to practice.
They attend AI strategy meetings, approve AI budgets, and ask for AI updates while remaining disconnected from the technology that’s reshaping everything.
AI isn't like a CRM system. It's not a tool you deploy—it's a thinking partner you develop for yourself.
It's not software you install—it's intelligence you integrate into your mindset, habits, and workflows.
This isn't about learning anything technical - it’s not about learning anything.
It’s about using AI as much as you possibly can. It's about reimagining leadership from the ground up. It's about shifting from "How can my team use AI?" to "How can AI make me a better leader?"
The solution is simply to become an AI-Amplified Leader—someone who embodies AI's transformative potential in all leadership capacities.
The Five Levers of an AI-Amplified Leader
Traditional leadership development focuses on building human capabilities.
An AI-amplified leader multiplies these capabilities exponentially.
Those who master AI integration across these levers will out-think, out-execute, and out-perform those who don't.
And anyone who attempts to lead without AI amplification in these areas will find themselves at a serious competitive disadvantage.
The good news? Right now, we're still in the early adopter phase.
Leaders who embrace AI today gain superpowers that compound over time.
Here are the five levers that separate tomorrow's leaders from today's:
🧠 Strategic Acumen
AI transforms how you approach complex decisions. Instead of relying solely on experience and intuition, you instantly access proven frameworks, analyze multiple scenarios, and pressure-test strategies against historical patterns.
Facing a critical market entry decision? You can instantly model competitive landscapes, stress-test projections, and explore alternatives. AI helps you think through second-order consequences, challenge assumptions, and consider overlooked perspectives.
The result: faster, more informed decisions that compound your natural strategic instincts with amplified intelligence.
📚 Domain Knowledge
Employee’s accumulated knowledge—from years in business, in your industry and experience within your company—becomes your organization's most valuable strategic asset when properly leveraged through AI.
The key is systematically capturing this domain knowledge in documents and structured data. When you feed AI your institutional insights, client patterns, market learnings, and operational expertise, it can instantly amplify domain knowledge into insights, wisdom, and competitive advantage.
⚡ Cognitive Horsepower
AI dramatically amplifies your cognitive intelligence in both breadth and depth while creating mental bandwidth for higher-order thinking. Rather than being limited by your individual knowledge and processing speed, AI extends your intellectual reach across vast domains of information and analysis. It can instantly synthesize insights from thousands of sources, analyze complex patterns you might miss, and process scenarios at superhuman speed.
By automating routine cognitive tasks, AI frees your mental capacity for pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, and strategic synthesis. What's remarkable is that this cognitive amplification is accelerating exponentially—as AI technology advances at breakneck speed, your augmented intelligence becomes increasingly powerful, giving you access to capabilities that would have been unimaginable just months ago.
🤝 Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Paradoxically, AI makes leaders more human by freeing them to focus on what matters most—emotional connection and human development. When AI handles administrative work and data analysis, you gain precious time for coaching conversations, relationship building, and the deeply human work of inspiration and motivation that no algorithm can replicate.
AI can also serve as your personal coach for the deliberate practice of soft skills—helping you refine your communication style, develop better feedback techniques, and enhance your emotional awareness. As AI adoption becomes universal across organizations, emotional intelligence will become the primary competitive differentiator. The companies that win won't just be those with the best AI—they'll be those whose leaders excel at shaping culture, helping employees grow, and creating environments where people find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in their work.
🔮 Vision, Values & Courage
When AI handles analytical heavy lifting, leaders also gain the mental space to attune to their deepest intuitive vision and clarify the values that guide their most critical decisions.
This isn't about AI generated vision—it's about creating the headspace for authentic leadership insight to emerge. AI provides the analytical confidence and scenario modeling that allows you to act boldly on your convictions, knowing you've pressure-tested your ideas against data and market realities. With AI backing your analysis, you can make courageous choices that create meaningful impact and competitive differentiation.
Leaders who combine clear vision, strong values, and AI-supported courage become unstoppable forces for transformation. Along with emotional intelligence, these uniquely human leadership traits become your primary focus when AI amplifies your cognitive capabilities—allowing you to lead from wisdom rather than just information.
This is Liberation Technology
The greatest opportunity with AI isn't productivity or efficiency or time savings.
It's elevating leadership quality and transforming the human experience of work.
When AI handles routine, administrative, and analytical tasks, leaders focus on what only humans can do: inspire, connect, envision, and create meaning.
The implications are profound.
Instead of reviewing reports, you coach your team. Instead of drowning in data analysis, you think strategically about the future. Instead of managing tasks, you cultivate culture.
AI-amplified leaders create environments where teams flourish. They model using technology in service of human potential, not despite it.
These organizations attract top talent, build stronger cultures, and create sustainable advantages.
The Path for an AI-Amplified Leader
The journey begins with a simple recognition: you can't lead an AI transformation you haven't experienced yourself.
So choose one area of your leadership responsibilities and commit to AI-enabling it completely.
Maybe it's strategic planning, where you use ChatGPT’s Deep Research to analyze market trends and model scenarios.
Maybe it's people, team, or skill development, where you create custom coaching GPTs that amplify training, engagement, and growth.
Maybe it's decision-making, where you train a custom GPT on your industry, business, and strategic frameworks, and then use it to brainstorm and pressure-test options.
Just be sure to build your AI leadership stack systematically and begin with the fundamentals:
a ChatGPT Plus subscription (btw Co-Pilot is significantly inferior)
Crafting instructions for custom GPTs and Projects
Creating habits and practices to use AI as much as you can (no more Googling!)
Like Lutke, show your team what AI-amplified leadership looks like. And as I wrote about previously, you don’t learn AI, you just do it.
Share your learning journey, your successes, and your challenges. Create psychological safety for experimentation and model the abundance mindset that sees AI as a collaborative partner, not a competitive threat.
The path toward AI-enabled leadership isn't just about mastering technology—it's about pioneering a new paradigm of leadership.
Your Leadership Legacy
We stand at a defining moment—one where you'll either look back with pride or regret at how you handled the AI revolution.
I know this personally. Looking back at COVID, I'm not proud of how I resorted to escapism and missed opportunities to lead when it mattered most. That experience taught me that when the world shifts, you can either rise to meet the moment or let it pass you by.
The AI revolution is our next test. Your team is watching. Your colleagues are watching. Most importantly, you're watching yourself. Will you be the leader who stuck their head in the sand? Or the one who embraced it as the ultimate amplifier of human potential?
This isn't about making history—it's about making the choice you can live with. The choice to transform yourself first, then lift others. The choice to use AI not for efficiency alone, but to create more space for the deeply human work of connection, vision, and inspiration.
Don't just adapt to the AI revolution—lead it. Don't just implement AI strategies—become an AI-amplified leader. Don't just use AI—use it to amplify your greatest potential.
The journey from AI dabbler to AI director starts with a single decision: to stop delegating your AI strategy and start directing your AI transformation.
The time is now. The tools are ready. The only question is whether you'll be among the leaders who seize this moment or among those who wish they had.
Want some help becoming an AI-Amplified Leader?
Coachfully.AI offering custom executive and team coaching programs that are designed to teach you to fish in the ocean of AI opportunities. 👉 https://www.coachfully.ai/ai-consulting/business-leaders
We’ve also partnered with CopperTeams.AI to bring you Build Your AI Edge — a 6-month, hands-on program designed to help your team work better together, and leverage the amazing potential of AI. And if you’re a business in British Columbia, you could get 80% of the cost covered through provincial funding. 👉 https://www.copperteams.ai/ai-edge-program