AI Fluency in 90 Days: 5 Behaviors Every Executive Needs to Bank Cash, Not Pilots

Executives don’t fail for lack of data; they fail when the music stops and no one has moved their chair.

Jeremy Irons' John Tuld in Margin Call nails that truth: "I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now, because when it stops, I don’t intend to be the one left standing without a chair."

Right now, the soundtrack is AI, and the tempo just doubled. In the last ninety days, we've watched vision-language models catch tumors before veteran radiologists blink, agentic dev-bots ship clean code while engineers sleep, supply-chain twins pull eight-figure working capital out of global networks, and ChatGPT o3 raise the reasoning bar again.

Breakthroughs now land weekly. "Wait and see" isn’t cautious; it’s value-destructive.

Plenty of firms are "experimenting with AI," yet only a sliver convert those experiments into cash. The separator isn't data-lake size, cloud budget, or model-of-the-month; it's AI fluency in the boardroom and C-suite: leaders who frame the bet, interrogate the black box, and deploy capital at market speed.

That message was front-and-center during BOI (Board of Innovation)'s AI Fluency for Executives session, led by Vincent Pirenne and Laura Stevens. Their frameworks echo what we see across the HauerX Holdings portfolio. Below is a synthesis of their insights, plus my perspective.

Awareness is no longer enough

MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research reports that 79% of boards still list their AI knowledge as minimal. Translation: the literacy gap is already a profit gap; firms whose directors score high on AI fluency are pulling ahead on both revenue growth and margin lift.

Leaders who outsource "the AI piece" to tech teams confuse activity for progress. They spin up a dozen proofs of concept, each starved of executive sponsorship, and wonder why nothing scales. Legal blocks data-sharing, finance buries spend in CapEx, and the transformation stalls.

Fluent boards break the pattern. They know just enough about models, data rights, and governance to judge risk, budget, and strategic fit in real time. Specialists provide depth; accountability stays at the top.

Five behaviors that mark an AI-fluent executive

Strip away the industry jargon; every AI success story boils down to the same leadership habits Vincent and Laura highlighted. Whether it's a bank fighting fraud or a manufacturer retooling a factory line, the patterns repeat. Executives who turn AI into P&L impact do five things every time:

1. Pick sharper bets first

Nail one painful workflow that moves the P&L fast.

• DBS Bank cut fraud losses with real-time anomaly scoring.

• Walmart slashed stock-outs via intelligent replenishment. One decisive win funds the next wave.

• Check out Seven Strategies to Compound Your AI Advantage for ideas on where to start.

2. Frame AI as augmentation, not replacement

• Schneider Electric paired every forecasting model with an internal "champion" who translated insights for frontline teams. Staff saw a co-pilot, not a pink slip, and adoption soared.

3. Demand smarter answers

• Fluent leaders ask, "What data trained this model? How will we track drift?"

• Google paused Gemini’s image generator in February 2024 after reviewers exposed wildly inaccurate historical images, proof that one hard question about training data can avert reputational damage.

4. Unify the enterprise

• One accountable owner and end-to-end budget per use case. Pilots stop dying in hand-offs because value streams, not org charts, hold the pen.

5. See around corners

• Before signing a multi-year model-as-a-service deal, fluent boards lock in retraining cadences, audit rights, and exit clauses. AI vendors are managed like every other strategic supply chain.

None of these moves require writing code; they demand curiosity, discipline, and zero tolerance for buzzwords.

A playbook to close the fluency gap

Vincent and Laura hammered home that AI maturity was a cadence problem before it was a tech problem. Here's the lean cadence they outlined, with a few additions of my own.

1. Learn continuously

• 15-minute standing agenda slot: AI That Hits the P&L, live wins or live risks only.

• Directors skim one high-signal feed, Nate Jones' AI Brief (one of my go-to resources), BOI webinar replays, and a Friday digest of need-to-know updates.

• One deep explainer a week (HBR's AI hub works) with three prompts to focus debate.

• At least one in-person immersion a year; BOI's Autonomous summit ticks the box.

2.  Learn together

• Annual off-site where product, tech, finance, HR score every AI initiative on value, feasibility, readiness; projects without a dollar figure or date get parked.

• Two outside provocateurs invited to challenge sacred cows.

• Quarterly "reverse mentoring": each director pairs with a data-science lead.

3. Anticipate the uncomfortable

• Stress-test every model for bias and hallucination before launch.

• Draft clean-room data-sharing rules before customers or regulators insist.

• Embed refresh cadence, explainability hooks, and exit clauses in every vendor contract.

Boards that run this rhythm graduate pilots to production inside a single budgeting cycle; skip it and you stay trapped in sandbox mode.

From pilot purgatory to compounding advantage

Seventy percent of AI pilots never leave the sandbox because no one defines the hand-off between "cool demo" and "live deployment." Below is the simple hand-off we use inside HauerX Holdings. No jargon, just three checkpoints:

1. Pick one wedge that moves real money. Select a single workflow where AI can unlock cash in under 90 days, fraud flags, dynamic pricing, inventory replenishment. Keep scope narrow, P&L impact clear. Check out Seven Strategies to Compound Your AI Advantage for ideas on where to start.

2. Prove it, then broadcast it. Ship the use case, measure hard ROI (hours saved, dollars freed, margin points added), and push the numbers across every leadership channel until the result is common currency.

3. Roll the gains forward immediately. Take a slice of the captured value and fund the next wedge before attention drifts. Momentum compounds when each win pays for the one that follows.

Most pilots die because steps 2 and 3 never happen: results stay buried in a slide deck, and the budget resets to zero. Make the hand-off explicit, and pilots turn into flywheels.

Momentum follows clarity; clarity follows fluency.

Your next step

• Score your leadership team against the five behaviors above. Be brutally honest.

• Pick a wedge you can monetize before the next earnings call.

• If you need a sharper framework, BOI's four-week Fluency Sprint gives executives the questions, templates, and guardrails that convert hype to enterprise value. Reach out for an introduction.

The music is still playing, but the chairs are going fast. In AI, clarity is the moat. Share this with the director or leader who still thinks AI lives in the IT budget, and let's raise the bar together.

About the Author

Jason Hauer is CEO of HauerX Holdings and an Inc. 500 honoree. He partners with commercial AI tech and solutions companies to turn ambition into market leadership.