Innovation is not a solo mission: How to lead AI when you know nothing about AI

Marketing leaders don’t need to become AI experts, they need to surround themselves with the best team to create AI-led initiatives, writes Lucio Ribeiro.

Lucio Ribeiro is an expert in artificial intelligence and its application for advertising, marketing and media.

We’ve all done it. Nodded along while someone explains something we thought we understood – until we try to explain it ourselves. A zipper. A bicycle. AI. And suddenly, we realise we don’t really know how it works – we just use it.

This is more than just a revealing moment of self-awareness. It’s a psychological phenomenon. In cognitive science, this is called the illusion of explanatory depth – the belief that we understand more about the world than we actually do. We learn a little about something, and suddenly we feel like experts. It’s like figuring out a few clever ChatGPT prompts and suddenly rating ourselves as prompt engineers.

Most of us confuse having access to knowledge with actually understanding it. And nowhere is this illusion more dangerous – or more common – than in today’s conversations about AI.

Your business doesn’t need more AI tool experts. It needs better leaders. I’ve been in enough boardrooms and executive sessions over the past year to hear first-hand from dozens of senior executives – smart, capable leaders who are feeling anything but confident when it comes to AI.

Many are scrambling to catch up – learning prompt engineering at midnight, downloading every new tool, doing crash courses on the latest platforms, and paying for specialised workshops. Some have even confessed they feel like they’re falling behind their own teams.

Here’s the truth: if you’re leading people into an AI-powered future, you don’t need to be the smartest or most technical person in the room. In fact, trying to become the technical expert can hold you, your team, and your business back. The tools are changing too fast. The landscape is shifting by the day. Trying to master every platform or model is like Lucille Ball at the conveyor belt in that famous chocolate factory scene – moving faster and faster, stuffing tools in your mouth and hat just to keep up, and still falling behind. It’s funny to watch, but brutal to live.

Leadership in AI isn’t about knowing more – it’s about doing better with what you don’t know.

We’re wired to make decisions and take action – not to store gigabytes of knowledge. Cognitive science shows that we operate more like nodes in a network than self-contained hard drives. We function best not in isolation, but in community, tapping into shared mental models and collective intelligence.

In a business setting, that means leaders don’t need to have all the AI answers – they need to know how to gather, trust, and co-ordinate the right brains around them to mobilise the AI initiative.

This is where the real value of leadership shows up. AI is a system-level shift, not a solo mission. It’s not about downloading the latest tool – it’s about creating a connected environment where ideas, insights, and execution can flow. Leaders should think less like operators and more like architects, designing structures that allow knowledge to move, adapt, and scale.

Intelligence isn’t contained within individuals; it’s spread across teams, tools and cultures. The smartest leaders are not those who pretend to know it all, but those who know who knows, what matters, and when to pull it together.

The job isn’t to compete with the experts – it’s to galvanise them. In an AI world, assembling those pockets of intelligence and directing them with purpose is the real skill.

Forget “becoming an AI expert”. Instead, become the person who creates space for expertise to grow. Help to educate your teams to understand why AI matters to your business. Not the nitty-gritty of every model, but the strategic relevance. Then, empower your people with the time, permission and access to experiment. And finally, encourage your team to adapt, fail, learn and try again. Remove the fear. If AI will replace people, give enough training and support to re-skill or upskill those who might be affected.

This isn’t an invitation to abdicate responsibility. You do need a level of AI literacy – especially if you’re reviewing proposals, approving vendors, or negotiating with partners. You don’t have to know how a transformer or diffusion model works, but you should understand enough to ask the right questions. What are the risks? Where is the data coming from? What does this mean for our customers? Because some of the decisions you’ll face aren’t just strategic – they’re legal, ethical and reputational. And then there’s regulation.

From data privacy to intellectual property, AI is intersecting with rules that many leaders haven’t had to think about in years – or ever. Knowing what your business is accountable for, and what AI might expose you to, matters.

You don’t need to be an engineer, but you should at least know which lever not to pull – you don’t want to open the cargo door mid-flight. As Churchill once said, “AI is like whisky: a little opens the mind, too much clouds it, and either way, you’d better not be drinking alone.” I’m not sure he actually said that, but it sounds about right.

Let’s drop the myth of the AI hero who single-handedly revolutionises a company with one brilliant idea and a custom GPT. That’s not how innovation works. It never has.

Real transformation lives in the collective. Knowledge sits not just in people’s heads, but in the relationships, workflows and tech they use. The role of a leader isn’t to be the knowledge – it’s to connect the knowledge. Think of yourself as a conductor. You don’t need to play the violin. You need to know what the piece is, where it’s going, and how to bring everyone in on time. It’s not about hitting every note yourself – it’s about creating the space where harmony can happen. And that, as it turns out, is exactly the kind of leadership your business needs right now.

At one of my recent keynotes on AI, a CEO came up to me after the session. He looked slightly sheepish and said, “I don’t really know what a language model is. Should I be worried?” I asked him what his team was working on. He lit up and rattled off a few AI initiatives they’d launched – one of which, funny enough, involved a proprietary language model doing some impressive work on customer segmentation.

He didn’t know the mechanics. But he built the team, gave them room to run, sought the principles of privacy and regulation and supervised their process. And it worked. That’s the job.

That’s how you lead when you know nothing about AI.

Lucio Ribeiro is an AI director and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence applied to marketing, advertising and business. He is a co-founder of InnovAItors, an AI community initiative to help bring corporations and start-ups together to bridge the AI knowledge gap.