AI Skills Compound. Waiting Isn't as Neutral as It Feels.

I'm not writing this to scare anyone or to persuade anyone. I'm writing it because I'm starting to feel a growing disconnect between how fast AI is evolving and how casually many of us, myself included at times, think about "keeping up."

If you're in a leadership role, especially one that depends on strategic thinking, judgment, and synthesis, where should you be in your AI learning journey right now?

Not long ago, feeling competent with AI meant being able to write a solid prompt, get a decent response, and move on. For a while, that felt like real progress. It probably was.

But over the last several months, something has shifted.

I've been talking with people who spend a lot of time experimenting with AI, and there's a shared, almost uneasy sense that the pace of change has accelerated. At the same time, in conversations with peers who use AI more lightly, I hear a growing confidence that they're "caught up."

Those two perspectives feel increasingly out of sync.

What's made me pause is the realization that AI skills seem to build on themselves. The value people are getting appears tied not just to the tools improving, but to the time they've already spent learning how to work with them. Practice and experience matter. And those gains don't reset when the technology advances. They compound.

That's left me wondering whether waiting is as neutral as it feels.

I don't have answers yet. What I do have is a growing curiosity about why capable, thoughtful leaders are having such different experiences with the same technology, and what that might mean as the landscape continues to shift.