With the Asia School of Business, I traveled back to Hangzhou to lead an executive module on AI, leadership and organizational design for senior leaders from some of Malaysia's largest government-linked companies. Participants representing agriculture, energy, investment, education, real estate and more, engaged in lively and enlightening discussions.

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Together we worked through five questions:

1. What pressures do leaders face inadopting AI?

2. What are the three stages everygeneral-purpose technology passes through?

3. What matters most in this AI era?

4. How should organizations be rebuiltaround learning loops, so strategy keeps absorbing real-time context andfeedback?

5. Why are the deciding factors foreffective adoption of AI the human ones?

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For context: McKinsey found that 80% ofpeople say AI makes them more productive, yet only 37% of organizations canattribute any profit impact to it. A group of super-individuals doesn'tautomatically add up to a super-organization.

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My takeaway: AI is easy to adoptindividually but hard to absorb organizationally. The companies that win will rewire how theirteams work and learn. The leader's role shifts from writing the plan tobuilding the structure where context and feedback flow in both directions, sostrategy can be discovered along the way, guided by mission andvision.

Thank you to ASB, Gillian Ng, Prof. Ts. Dr.David Asirvatham, Prof Rong and to the Malaysian business leaders who made thesession so rich and full of learnings!