#478 Noah Kruthaupt and Niels Brabandt on How Leaders Must Bridge the AI Divide Across Generations
Noah Kruthaupt and Niels Brabandt on How Leaders Must Bridge the AI Divide Across Generations
Artificial intelligence has not merely introduced a new technological tool. It has introduced a new leadership responsibility. The rapid emergence of AI has exposed a widening gap between those who understand its strategic implications and those who remain uncertain about its relevance, risks, and opportunities.
In a compelling interview with leadership expert Niels Brabandt, AI educator and author Noah Kruthaupt explains why AI adoption is not primarily a technological challenge, but a leadership challenge that requires clarity, education, and strategic discipline.
Why AI adoption failed to provide a proper on-ramp for leaders
One of the central insights shared by Noah Kruthaupt is that AI entered the business world without a structured introduction for most organisations. While AI had been evolving for decades in laboratories and specialised environments, its sudden accessibility created confusion across leadership teams.
For many decision-makers, AI appeared overnight as a disruptive force rather than a predictable evolution. This lack of preparation has resulted in hesitation, misapplication, and missed opportunities.
Niels Brabandt highlights that leaders must recognise their responsibility to provide clarity. AI cannot be treated as a purely technical subject. It is a strategic leadership priority.
Why AI literacy has become a competitive leadership advantage
According to Noah Kruthaupt, data is now the most important competitive asset any organisation possesses. AI is fundamentally a tool that enables organisations to understand, analyse, and act on their data more effectively.
Organisations that fail to develop AI literacy risk falling behind competitors who use AI to accelerate decision-making, improve operational efficiency, and identify strategic opportunities.
Leadership teams must understand that AI literacy is not optional. It is a prerequisite for organisational competitiveness.
The 92/8 principle that defines the future of leadership work
One of the most powerful frameworks discussed by Noah Kruthaupt is the 92/8 principle. Approximately 92 percent of daily business tasks are routine, structured, and repeatable. These tasks can be significantly enhanced or automated through AI.
The remaining 8 percent consists of creativity, judgement, and strategic decision-making. This is where leadership remains irreplaceable.
This distinction clarifies the true role of AI. AI does not replace leadership. It enhances leadership by freeing leaders to focus on strategic priorities.
Why human oversight remains essential in AI-driven organisations
Despite AI’s capabilities, Noah Kruthaupt emphasises the importance of maintaining human oversight. AI should support decision-making, not replace accountability.
Organisations that implement AI successfully ensure that human leaders remain responsible for final decisions, quality assurance, and strategic direction.
Human oversight protects organisations from errors, reputational risks, and operational failures.
How leaders must introduce AI to their organisations
Niels Brabandt and Noah Kruthaupt emphasise that effective AI adoption requires practical engagement rather than theoretical discussion. Leaders must create environments where employees actively use AI, experiment with it, and develop confidence.
Education, training, and hands-on experience are essential.
Leaders who actively engage with AI alongside their teams build organisational confidence and accelerate adoption.
Conclusion: AI adoption is a leadership responsibility, not a technical project
The interview between Noah Kruthaupt and Niels Brabandt makes one fact clear. AI adoption is fundamentally a leadership challenge.
Leaders who understand AI’s strategic role, educate their organisations, and maintain human oversight will unlock significant competitive advantages.
Those who hesitate risk irrelevance.
Leadership in the age of AI requires courage, curiosity, and clarity.
Niels Brabandt
---
More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, Moderator.
Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
And suddenly AI was there. You all remember when AI suddenly happened, and some of you might have been prepared, but let's face it, most people—for most people—it's probably a shock. And we have an expert on the matter with us here today. Hello and welcome, Noah Kruthout.
Noah Kruthaupt
Hello there. I'm Noah Kruthout, author of AI for Boomers and founder of AI Answered. And yeah, that AI bubble kind of came out of nowhere over the past four years, and ever since COVID, things have just completely changed.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah, absolutely. You said that AI entering society without a clear on-ramping was a mistake. What, in your opinion, how should an effective on-ramp have looked like, in your opinion?
Noah Kruthaupt
Yeah, it really came out of nowhere. So like you said, there wasn't really room for an on-ramp. And in the background, over the past 20 years or so, and even longer before that, AI and machine learning was always kind of something happening in the background, happening in labs. And it's very similar if you look at even just the computer and the internet, how it was something happening in the background with all these supercomputers that places like Apple and Microsoft might have been using back in even the '80s or '90s before it got really released to the public and became accessible. It was just so expensive to run. They were running tests. They were worried about security.
Noah Kruthaupt
And then out of nowhere, something like ChatGPT just came to the market. It was, I think, around 2021 and 2020 that it really started getting integrated in everything. And it was really something that was simple but only understood by the younger generation when it came out. So there just was this little bit of a barrier where the older generation, they thought it was too technical, and it just wasn't.
Niels Brabandt
So how would you say AI confusion shows up differently across the different generations, especially in the workplace? Because in the workplace, they all have to work together. However, we probably all see that AI is not used equally across generations.
Noah Kruthaupt
Right. Yeah. Well, it's kind of seen as something new and scary, I think, by people who don't feel comfortable enough with technology as it is. And some of it is just identity, even. A manager saying that, "Oh, I'm not a tech person. Let's just try to stay out of it until we need to use it."
Noah Kruthaupt
And it's really putting a lot of people behind because the number one point to give you a competitive edge in this day and age with a business is data and how you use your data. And that's AI. That's what it is. It's understanding your data and talking with it.
Noah Kruthaupt
So I think it comes with this big point of you need the identity of it's not a hard thing to understand. It's very simple, actually, but you just need it broken down. And often, the younger people like to experiment and see what these new things are, and then kind of gets left behind for the older generations that are trying to catch up.
Niels Brabandt
And when we talk about AI being used in the workplace, what, in your opinion, are the most costly ways? They either underuse it or, on the other side, probably what are the most dangerous ways where people probably overtrust AI?
Noah Kruthaupt
Right. Yeah. So this is a very good question and is of recent, too, because ClaudeBot—I'm not sure if you've heard of this—it's come out, and it's basically an AI that can take over your computer and run anything on it. So it gets access to your bank information, to everything. It could sign in and out of anything. It looks just like a human. And this is a case where I think that you should lean more towards being wary of whether it's secure or not and really having a professional setup if you're using something like this.
Noah Kruthaupt
But more broadly, to answer your question, McKinsey had a study recently showing that I think 94% of AI use cases didn't generate any revenue or make any difference whatsoever.
Niels Brabandt
Correct. I know that study. Yes.
Noah Kruthaupt
Really focusing and honing in on making things more efficient or more easy where it relates to things that are already efficient as they are. A lot of businesses are coming in, and they're automating things that already aren't inefficient, if that makes more sense.
Noah Kruthaupt
So coming in and focusing on that and overall just leading to better decision-making and simplifying things and shortening the time spent on things like analytics and just being able to talk to it directly.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. Excellent point here. Because let's think about people listening to this right now or watching this who are executives. They probably are looking for someone who sees AI rather as a practical tool rather than just a buzzword or the next big hype we have to put into the organization.
Niels Brabandt
What, in your opinion, if a manager or an executive asks you, "What are the highest value, let's say, everyday uses that leaders should normalize across probably many teams?"
Noah Kruthaupt
Yeah. It's a funny question that you asked there because I was just abroad in Europe. I was studying in Luxembourg, and I had the chance to go to this global banking event with one of my teachers. And at this event, the source of the bank, KPMG, and one of the leaders of RBS asked me a very similar question of, "I don't really know 100% what our boardrooms are doing."
Noah Kruthaupt
So I was sitting next to him during this entire event, and I was kind of translating things for him. And I'd seen this before a few times where all these terms that weren't super technical but where there was no on-ramp, it just had to be completely translated for them. And this happens all the time.
Noah Kruthaupt
But it kind of got to this point where I started to see that what places like EY and KPMG and RBS, what they're doing in their boardrooms and what the IT departments are doing when they come together, the things you could take away are really applied to everyday life. I mean, it's as simple as having all the data in the PDFs thrown into one thing, so you have a knowledge base. So being able to prompt your knowledge base and have a lot of context.
Noah Kruthaupt
And in daily life, that might look like when you have a question about your doctor's appointment, having it connected to giving it a list of prescriptions in a Google Doc or just giving it as much context as possible. And then something they like to do in boardrooms also is just have AI sitting there on the call. Have you seen where? And they just have it sitting there and listening to everything while it's muted, so it picks up the context of everything.
Noah Kruthaupt
So you start to see more and more things come out like that where what's going on at the highest level can really be just as simple for someone to use every day. And it's really just the barrier of knowing when and where to use it, knowing the scope of how AI is being used that's kind of holding people back right now.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything if a manager or an executive that usually these people, especially in American corporations, are risk-averse due to the fact that they fear that their job might be on the line when they do it wrong? Is there anything where you say probably where would you say that AI explicitly should not be trusted, even if it looks confident? Any case is there?
Noah Kruthaupt
I would say I'd lean toward anything where there's a lot of creativity that affects the outcome. I think AI is really good for giving you ideas. But something we talked about a lot in our book is the 92/8 rule. And it's this ratio of kind of through the conversations we've had with the different executives, with our mentors, teachers, small business owners, and everyone else that we had interviewed in the process of making this book, we found out that 92% of things that you're doing every day are very monotonous, very the AI can do it.
Noah Kruthaupt
It's not something that requires immediate decision-making or creativity or human bias at all, looking through spreadsheets, responding to emails, or reading through the ones that are useless to you. And the 8% is the creativity and the decision-making and everything important that you make a difference in. So I think really leaving that 8% and being able to practice, I think, outside of maybe the workplace to be able to understand where that 8% is, I think just being able to own that is huge because even in advertising, for example, a lot of the best ads are something that's considered imperfect by AI if it were to try to generate it. So I think a lot of genius and creativity comes out of imperfectionism.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. So let's just assume one case because probably any manager will know that case where they said, "I heard about an organization where XYZ happened. This went wrong, and someone, of course, needs to be blamed for it." And even if we don't play the blame game here, what would you say? How can an organization rebuild the confidence after something went wrong with AI? Because let's face it, sooner or later, maybe something, maybe even a tiny bit or a small project might go wrong based on AI. How to rebuild the confidence once something went wrong? Because immediately, the people will pop up and will say, "Told you so."
Noah Kruthaupt
Yeah. That's a very true point. It happens all the time. So AI being used across these companies and trying to point fingers at it when something goes wrong is something we see a lot, especially as we get in the training. And one thing that has to remain, I think, no matter what you do with AI, I think unless AI is specifically just filing through a database or information, that's one of the only use cases where you should just leave it to itself to do its own thing.
Noah Kruthaupt
There should always be a human involved is the core point of stopping the blame game there. Because if you have a human in the loop looking over everything, it kind of leaves them in charge of the scenario. And they're the one that even if there's a small, tiny mistake, there needs to be someone in charge of it still, even if it was overlooked.
Noah Kruthaupt
But it does happen a lot. And even with automation, where you see business automating something like phone calls, there should always be a human going through and checking all the boxes as it goes through the setup, at least for the first couple of weeks, maybe. But I think just keeping a really close eye on everything that's happening and making sure you have a human in the loop, just double-checking and verifying everything.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. Excellent. So coming to the wrap-up of this interview, two more questions I have. So the first one, what, in your opinion, should leaders teach employees about AI opportunities and limitations during the first hour of an AI rollout? So that means it cannot be long advice. It needs to be spot-on and brief. Your chance to say opportunities and limitations when you only have one hour to give a message, maybe via video or during a town hall, to your organization.
Noah Kruthaupt
That's a great question. Yeah. So if you had only an hour, I think some of the best things you could prompt them to do are to spend time that first hour with having them use it in front of you. Because a lot of the times, the case is that you could tell them all these use cases and scenarios and the scope of it. And until someone who's never really used AI or hasn't used it confidently in work, they're never going to use it if you just tell them to.
Noah Kruthaupt
So that's why in our book, AI for Boomers, we have all the use cases, and we have videos that go with it because we want the person to be learning with us. And it's something where, as we wrote the book, we realized all the opportunities that come with it in just better understanding the world and becoming more curious, becoming a lifelong learner. So the opportunities are really endless.
Noah Kruthaupt
Something we talk about in one of the final chapters is how it's almost like the Library of Alexandria. We kind of bring up this sort of topic and how all of the information on the internet and in the world is kind of one prompt away. And getting people to understand how important that is when doing anything in daily life, in work, and in a hobby, I mean, it's just a complete game-changer. And it's not super hard to learn as long as you're doing it consistently and trying every day. And I think having fun with it, just have fun, test it out, give it some practice, and you'll just be so surprised by the different results we get.
Niels Brabandt
Perfect. When now people say, "Hey, I think I either like to have the book," or maybe they want help directly from you. So first, of course, where can they find the book? How are the books called? And of course, when they want to reach out to you, how can they reach out to you?
Noah Kruthaupt
Yeah. So our book, AI for Boomers, it's on Amazon. So if you search up AI for Boomers by Noah and Andrew, it'll come up. Sorry, bright blue and red logo.
Noah Kruthaupt
And also on AIanswered.com, we have our Amazon link and audiobook link coming soon. But there's also all sorts of free resources on there as well as our contact information. So there's a little contact form if you need to reach us. We do free consultation and would love to meet any business owner or someone who's trying to learn AI and kind of guide them through the first steps. But yeah, contact@aianswered.com is our primary email.
Niels Brabandt
Perfect. I think these are the perfect final words. Noah Crotthalp, thank you very much for your time.
Noah Kruthaupt
Thank you, Niels.