Business Leaders Cannot Afford to Delegate AI Strategy to Technical Teams

Jan 25, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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By Karen Abrams, MBA, AA, Doctoral Candidate

(Kaieteur News) – Business leaders occupy a vantage point few others do. Effective leadership requires constant scanning of environmental variables such as politics, competition, regulation, labor markets, and emerging technologies. At the same time, leaders confront the hard realities of bank balances, cash flow, and financial statements. Risk is not an abstract concept. It is strategic and deeply personal.

When employees can respond to uncertainty by seeking new employment, business leaders cannot. They carry the weight of downturns, poor decisions, weak execution, gaps in vision, and inefficient operations. The consequences do not disappear. They compound, and they rest squarely on the shoulders of those responsible for keeping the organization alive.

The business leader’s vantage point belongs to them alone. Yet many believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beyond their ability to fully comprehend and are eager to hand over strategic decisions about artificial intelligence to technical teams simply because the technology feels complex and unfamiliar. My advice to any business leader who wishes to survive is simple. Resist the urge.  Ex Google CEO, Eric Schmidt is famously quoted saying, “AI will be the most transformative technology since electricity. Those who move early will define the future. Those who do not will be defined by it.

AI strategy is not a back-office function. It is not an IT project. It cannot be safely delegated and revisited once the engineers are finished. AI is already reshaping how organizations operate, compete, scale, and maintain profitability. Business leaders who remove themselves from the AI conversation surrender a critical strategic imperative, increasing the likelihood of poor decisions that can directly threaten the survival of their companies.

As a nonprofit with a small management team, STEM Guyana operates without a formal IT security department, although over several years, we have been targeted by persistent local cyber attacks serious enough to warrant the involvement of international technology agencies recently using advanced AI-driven security systems. Through a controlled honey pot approach, monitored decoy environments have been deployed to attract attackers, allowing data to be collected, patterns to be analyzed, and intelligence to be gathered. These investigations are intricate but remain ongoing, and new technologies have been central to our ability to navigate these challenges.  Cyber threats have been a sad, relentless scourge with which we have had to contend over the years.

That same posture shaped how we adopted AI. Today we operate with roughly ninety percent less reliance on cloud spreadsheets and data files on various employee computers. We have quite literally vibe coded our way to operational efficiency. Registration processing across all services has been streamlined. Turnaround times have collapsed. This has happened during a period when finding human resources that fit both our culture and the required expertise have become increasingly difficult.

One of our biggest wins came with the development of a fully integrated end-to-end seminar management system. Automated registration flows directly into formative evaluation and ends with the auto-generation of numbered certificates. What once took weeks of manual coordination now runs smoothly at scale. We process hundreds of registrations with ease and add new features almost on demand. This is not incremental improvement. This is structural change driven by leadership clarity, not technical heroics.

Here is the uncomfortable truth many organizations avoid. If your development team is still saying to you that critical applications must take months to deploy, something is broken. If your security teams and engineers cannot explain how AI tools improve organizational efficiency at scale, they are already behind. The market will not wait for them to catch up.

But technical teams are not the villains here. Leadership abdication is. Business leaders must understand enough about AI to ask the right questions and craft the correct strategic vision for their companies. They must insist on documented workflows and organized internal data. AI amplifies what already exists. If your processes are fragmented and your data is chaotic, AI will expose that reality faster and more brutally than any audit.

We often say change is coming. That framing is already obsolete. Change is here. The world three years from now will look dramatically different from today, and the realities of 2026; markets, competition, and technology, already diverge sharply from those of 2023. Those who prepared early and committed to continuous improvement will benefit disproportionately. Skeptics and doubters will not quietly opt out. They will be overtaken.

For business leaders in Guyana, this is not a future problem. It is a present one. Move now or lose later. Yes, this is a warning.

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• AI Strategy, business leaders, Karen Abrams, Politics, Technical Teams

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