Stop piloting & start leading: The conversation you aren’t having

About the session

You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something about how AI is landing in your organisation doesn’t feel right. There have been some wins, but also some stalls.

The gap isn’t necessarily in your tools. It’s in what leaders do, or don’t do, to create the conditions for AI to work.

The very skills many organisations have underinvested in for years - independent thinking, judgement-led action, confidence, and psychological safety, are becoming increasingly important as people navigate AI at work.

This session looks at AI-readiness through that leadership lens: it’s not about whether people have access to the right technology, but whether they have the permission, ownership, and support to use it well.

In this practical, interactive session, Aiko Sato, Head of Client Solutions at Jenny Garrett Global, brings together the firm’s work with senior HR and People leaders with frameworks developed by Jenny Garrett OBE, informed by her participation in MIT’s AI Strategy and Leadership Programme and her forthcoming book, AI for Equity.

Together, we’ll explore what AI-readiness actually requires of leaders and their people, using three conditions that help people act entrepreneurially at work: efficacy, identity, and belonging. Through reflection, discussion, real-world scenarios, and a live self-audit, you’ll consider where your organisation enables people to thrive or where leadership behaviours may inadvertently be getting in the way.

This session is for senior HR, L&D, and People professionals who suspect that AI-readiness requires more than training or engagement campaigns, and are ready to tackle the leadership conditions hands-on.

What we’ll explore

During this interactive session, we’ll:

• Rethink entrepreneurial leadership, moving beyond the idea that it belongs to founders or a handful of naturally entrepreneurial people, and considering how leaders can create the conditions for it across an organisation.
• Explore the three conditions of efficacy, identity, and belonging, and what can happen when one of them is missing
• Complete a short leadership self-audit, considering whether people have the freedom to make decisions, bring their own judgement and ideas to their work, and speak up safely
• Work through real-world leadership scenarios to see how everyday behaviours can reinforce or remove barriers to ownership
• Examine the signals leaders send, particularly in hybrid and online environments, about what is expected, what is safe, and how much autonomy people really have
• Identify one 30-day experiment you can use to strengthen an area where your leadership or organisation could better support AI-readiness.

What you’ll leave with

By the end of the session, you’ll have:

• A practical framework for understanding the human and leadership conditions behind AI-readiness.
• A clearer view of whether efficacy, identity, or belonging may be limiting ownership and experimentation in your context
• A way to examine your own leadership behaviours, not just your organisation’s overall AI strategy.
• Three questions to test your AI strategy through a people and leadership lens
• A concrete 30-day experiment to take back into your organisation and put the thinking into practice.

About the speaker:

Aiko Sato - Jenny Garrett Global

Aiko Sato is Head of Client Solutions at Jenny Garrett Global, where she works with organisations to understand their leadership challenges and design solutions that support meaningful, sustainable change. Before moving into leadership development, Aiko spent ten years working in education working with thousands of primary school students and their teachers across the US. She holds a Master’s degree in Curriculum & Instruction, grounding her work in how people learn, change behavior, and apply new ideas in practice. Today, she brings that learning lens together with commercial and client strategy, working closely with senior people professionals and people leaders navigating the changing world of work.

Guest speakers
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