#FOODFORTHOUGHT: The AI Leadership Gap

23. März 202621. März 2026 Gero Hesse 0 Views 0 Comment

#FOODFORTHOUGHT: The AI Leadership Gap

If you run a company today, there’s a new challenge: AI is moving faster than your calendar.

As CEO of EMBRACE, I take AI extremely seriously. Each of the EMBRACE Family companies already has its own AI teams. On top of that, we created a central AI & Innovation team that supports these decentralized teams with trend scouting, prototyping and new product development.

One concrete result already exists: the Employer Branding AI Suite developed by the m&z agency — dramatically accelerating core employer branding processes. For example, classic EVP projects that previously took around six months can now be completed in roughly 2.5 months. At the same time, AI enables up to 85% efficiency gains in data analysis.

So strategically, at EMBRACE things are set up. Back to my calendar issue mentioned above: Because AI evolves at high speed, it makes it extremely hard to keep up — especially if your actual job is still… running a company. There are board meetings, strategy discussions, customers…you name it. Quite often I wonder, how to cope with this situation. Especially since I really want to understand AI as much as possible. So here’s my personal strategy for myself so far:

I experiment.

Quite often in the evening, I sit in front of my computer playing with AI tools — experimenting with things like Midjourney prompts or building Custom GPTs that help me structure podcasts, interviews and newsletter content. This is messy, sometimes frustrating and often surprising. For me, it seems to work. For me, AI is not a topic you can fully understand by only reading about it. I need to use it.

My SAATKORN podcast actually helps a lot here. These days almost every conversation touches AI in one way or another. Talking to founders, product builders and operators is probably one of the best learning formats I know.

And yes — I also follow a few AI voices on LinkedIn. Only a few, because the number of self-declared AI gurus currently seems to be growing faster than GPU demand. One person whose content I genuinely enjoy is Ruben Hassid, who clearly falls into the category of so-called AI gurus. Still, I appreciate his clear, practical, and genuinely useful content—even if it sometimes feels a bit over the top. Another helpful experience recently was learning from Niklas Nosper. Practical insights beat theory every time. So what’s my conclusion so far?