Most leaders still talk about AI as if it were a strategy topic. It isn’t. It’s an exposure.
I came across a piece by McKinsey & Company on why meditation is becoming essential for leaders. On the surface, it’s easy to agree: more complexity, more speed, more need for clarity.
But if you stay with it a bit longer, something more uncomfortable appears.
AI is quietly removing what many leaders have relied on for years: the identity of being the one who knows, who structures, who brings certainty into the room. Machines are now faster, often more precise, and increasingly better at exactly that.
So the real question is shifting.
What remains when thinking is no longer your edge?
In my work with executive teams, the real limitation is rarely intelligence. It’s what happens internally the moment certainty drops. Tension rises, ambiguity increases, and instead of staying with it, most leaders move too quickly - into control, into action, into familiar patterns that feel like strength but are often just a way to escape not knowing.
This is where meditation becomes relevant, not as a technique to calm down, but as a way of training perception. Over time, it builds the capacity to notice your own impulses before they turn into decisions, to see the subtle reactivity that shapes outcomes long before any strategy is discussed.
And if you go deeper into this work - not occasionally, but over years - it shifts even further. At some point, it’s no longer about focus or stress reduction. It moves beyond thought, beyond the usual sense of self, even beyond the way we habitually experience separation and control.
I’ve spent close to three decades practicing in that space with teachers who operate at that level. Not as something abstract, but as a very concrete inquiry into what actually shapes how we perceive and act. And from that perspective, many leadership challenges look fundamentally different.
AI will outperform you in thinking. But it cannot replace the level of consciousness you lead from.
What strikes me is how little attention this gets. We are investing massively in technology, while largely ignoring the inner capacity of the people using it. In effect, we are scaling capability without upgrading the operator.
So maybe the more honest question is not how to keep up with AI, but whether we are willing to look at what is driving us before any tool, any strategy, any decision comes into play.
Because that is the one variable technology will not solve for us.