💃 Leaders, Your Team Has AI! Now What?🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd!

Your company bought the AI tools. You sent onboarding emails to your team. You even created a slack channel with a canvas full of AI tips and tricks - prompt engineering, youtube vids, and some of your own AI-powered solutions you built.

Most leaders treat AI adoption like stocking a kitchen.

✅ Buy the fancy appliances

✅ Fill the pantry

✅ Polish the dinnerware.

You’ve set this up and nobody's cooking 🤔.

The kitchen is gorgeous 💃. The food is terrible 😣.

Nobody knows how to hold a knife or boil (and chill) a soft boiled egg.

If you want your team cooking with AI, you need three courses ⬇️

STOCK THE KITCHEN

How should company leaders set up their organizations for AI adoption?

Before anyone touches a burner, the kitchen needs health codes. Vision without guardrails is a grease fire 🔥💀.

❓What tools are approved?

❓What data can go into a prompt and what absolutely cannot?

❓Where does AI-generated output require a human review before it ships?

These are the difference between a Michelin kitchen and a food truck that gives everyone food poisoning.

Your AI policy should fit on one page.

✅ Approved tools

✅ Data rules

✅ Review requirements, who to call when something looks wrong.

If it takes a legal team and a 47-slide deck to explain, your people will ignore it and use Claude under their desk anyway.

There's real data behind the guardrails. A Harvard Business School study found consultants using AI produced 40% higher quality work on tasks within AI's sweet spot, but were 19 percentage points more likely to deliver incorrect results when they wandered outside that zone.

AI is a legit needle-mover

INVEST IN GOOD KNIFE SHARPENERS

Why investing in AI skills pays back faster than any tool license

You stocked the kitchen. Now arm your team. And "arm" means more than handing them a login.

Access is table stakes….the spatula, everybody gets one 💯.

The real investment is sharpening your people's skills, and that means paying for it.

Literally…

Bonuses for certifications 💰 and paying for the certification fee 💵. Incentivize and minimize friction 🙌.

And time is money 👇

Dedicate time for your team to experiment. Not just a lunch-and-learn. Dedicated hours with permission (and a sandbox) to fail. Better yet, give them deliverables that power AI or are AI-powered, like a Slackbot skill or a call transcription summarizer, respectively.

Then shine a spotlight 🔦

Publicly recognize the people doing creative work with AI. A monthly demo slot. A Slack channel for wins. A callout in the all-hands.

Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index found only 16% of AI users qualify as "Frontier Professionals" who've actually redesigned workflows around AI. 80% of that group say they produce work they couldn't have done a year ago. Those are your force multipliers. Find them, fund them, put them on stage. The rest of the team follows the light.

TASTE YOUR OWN COOKING

Best Case, Worst Case, Most Likely

Back to the kitchen 👨‍🍳.

You stocked the pantry, bought the knives, and now you're standing at the pass watching everyone else cook. That's a restaurant manager’s role…you’re a Chef.

An effective chef will get on the line with their cooks and show them your mastery 🧠.

The leaders who move the needle are the ones who use AI. Gallup's 2026 workforce research shows roughly seven in ten leaders who personally use AI report meaningful efficiency gains, compared to just over half of individual contributors. In short, get on the line with your team and teach them to be as effective as you are with AI.

Three things to do this week:

Prompt together. Sit with your direct reports and build prompts side by side. A working session where you're solving a real problem in real time. Your team watches you struggle with a prompt, iterate, and get to something useful. Suddenly AI goes from "corporate initiative" to "thing my boss actually does."

Scrub the slop. Always. Every AI output gets a quality pass before it touches a customer or stakeholder. You read the output, catch the hallucination, the generic filler, the "It’s not X, it’s Y" filler that screams robot 🤖. Coach your team on what good looks like versus what lazy looks like. This is the single fastest way to build AI fluency across your org.

Solve real problems. Don't ask your team to "experiment with AI." Hand them a real, specific problem and work alongside them 🤝. The quarterly forecast that takes two days of manual reconciliation. The RFP response that eats three people for a week. The Salesforce report cleanup nobody wants to touch. Be specific, and have your own AI-powered approach or prompt in mind so you can be ready with coaching!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

A chef has more knowledge, skills, and experience than their line cooks. It’s their responsibility to pass on knife skills to their prep chef.

Do you “step up your julienne cuts!!” Or do you walk over the cutting board, give context to what you’re about to do, do the thing, and then pass the knife to your cook and say “your turn 🙂.”

Before you send the next "embrace AI" email, ask yourself 👇

❓ Have you personally used AI to complete a work task in the last 5 days?

❓ Does your budget include paid AI certifications or dedicated experimentation time?

❓ Can you name 3 people on your team doing standout work with AI?

❓ When did you last sit with a direct report and teach them an AI tool or technique? Or anything at all?

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes