If you ask almost any professional who owns their organization’s AI transformation, they’ll likely point to a role at the top of the org chart or a team charged with the work.

While those answers aren’t wrong, they’re incomplete. Companies are spending millions on centralized structures to drive AI transformation and are still struggling to show meaningful results. Leaders can set direction, but no executive can see the thousands of small workflows that make up company operations. The people who understand a process well enough to redesign it are usually the ones executing it every day.

That’s why we stopped asking how many people are using AI and started focusing on how people are using it to rethink how work gets done. There’s a big difference. A user might leverage AI to summarize a document or draft an email. A builder looks at a workflow and asks, “Why are we still doing it this way?” and then changes it.

Builders are not always engineers and likely don’t report to the chief AI officer or another executive. It is a mindset, not a role. Builders generally share three characteristics: They are close to the work, naturally curious, and proactively improve workflows without waiting for permission.

A builder might be a salesperson redesigning follow-up to increase win rates, an accountant building automation to flag anomalies before month-end close, or an analyst eliminating transactional work so they can spend more time bringing insights to the business.

Leadership’s role is to chart the AI strategy and provide training, tools, guardrails, and agency to allow the people who know the work best to transform the work.

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