AI Adoption Is a Leadership Job: What Matt Symes Told Atlantic Business Magazine
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AI adoption has to be led by the CEO and the leadership team. Handing it to IT, or handing people tools and hoping they use them, won't get an organization what it needs. That's the through-line of Matt Symes's conversation on Episode 5 of Atlantic Business Magazine's video podcast, For The Record. WATCH THE FULL EPISODE For The Record, Episode 5: "Ready or not, AI is here" · Atlantic Business Magazine · about 42 minutes, free https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieI_WeVxKZQ The episode in brief • Show: For The Record, Atlantic Business Magazine's video podcast • Episode: 5, "Ready or not, AI is here" • Guest: Matt Symes, the University of New Brunswick's AI Entrepreneur in Residence • Length: about 42 minutes • Covers: AI risk, jobs and skills, the aging workforce, whether AI makes us mentally lazy, and how organizations should lead the change Five lessons for leadership teams 1. AI adoption is a change challenge first. 2. The CEO has to lead it. 3. Change sticks when it's made with people. 4. Experienced employees are your quality control. 5. Your organization has to protect its own judgment. 1. Why is AI adoption a change challenge? Because the capability is already here. In Matt's words, AI "has just fundamentally changed the game in every vertical. It's just most people don't know it yet and most organizations have a tough time leading change." (16:25) What it takes is clarity. "The other three major changes require capital. This one just requires clarity." (17:07) For a leadership team, that means clarity on three things: • where the business is going • how its workflows are changing • how the skills its people need are changing 2. Who should lead AI adoption? The CEO. Matt names three signs that an organization will integrate AI successfully: 1. It's CEO-led. 2. It re-engineers or reimagines the workflow. 3. It's done with people, not to people. On the first, he is direct: "This is not something you can delegate or abdicate. You can't just ask your head of IT to do it. You can't just give people tools and hope they do it." (37:09) Asked for the biggest myth business owners believe about AI, he named the same trap: they think AI is IT. "As long as you stare at it as if it's IT, you're never going to get what you need out of it." (40:25) 3. How do you make AI change stick? Make it with the people who do the work. "People don't get exhausted by change if they're involved in doing it." (38:28) The reverse is just as predictable. "If you choose what you're going to do on the other side, you're probably going to keep doing it. If you're told to do it, you're probably going to find all kinds of reasons for why it's not going to work." (39:06) It's also why Symplicity turns down process work done to a team. "If you ask me to come in and just build you a new process, we won't do it, because we know it won't work." (38:44) In practice, that work starts by seeing the organization as a map of workflows and asking whether each one still creates value (18:30). Most skilled technicians can't fully explain how they do what they do. A good facilitator helps them put it into words (33:19), and once the workflow is visible, the team can decide where AI fits. 4. What role do experienced employees play? They are an asset, and an underused one. "We got to stop treating it as a liability. It's an incredible asset." (22:41) Experienced people know what good looks like (24:28). When AI produces something that isn't good, they can correct course, where a new hire may not see the problem. Matt's math: if your team works at 80% productivity, every person is 0.8 of a full-time equivalent, and AI can help close that gap with the people you already have (22:56). They won't pick AI up on their own, though. "They have to be walked through it." (23:23) This is a regional priority as well. Matt served as the AI advisor to the Atlantic Economic Panel, which recommended training at least 100,000 Atlantic Canadian workers in AI (15:24). 5. How do you protect your organization's judgment? Build it in on purpose. Teams will spend more time editing and verifying AI's work than doing the work themselves. Matt's question for leaders: do you still know how to build the bridge? (27:42) Organizations that run very lean on AI will take on real risk to gain profit, and some will pay for it (28:15). The safeguard is a deliberate practice of doing the work, which Matt calls a cognitive gym. "As a leader for your business, you didn't ask to have to do this, but you now have to do it for every one of your employees." (29:10) The same applies to who you hire. Matt looks for three traits: judgment, curiosity and systems thinking (30:59). And he warns that confidence is easy to mistake for quality: "If you do not have domain expertise, you really can't sniff a bad answer." (10:13) How Symplicity applies this to itself The interview traces Symplicity's own change. In 2019, it was a traditional advisory firm with 23 employees. Today it is an AI-first management consultancy with less staff and more than double the revenue. Matt credits human-centred leadership for the growth. Part of that shift was moving from short engagements to long-term partnerships. Symplicity now holds minority or majority stakes in a portfolio of companies, including coffee, cladding, counselling and legal businesses, with incentives aligned for the long run (35:29). As Matt put it, once technical skill is no longer the limit, "what's left? Relationships." (35:22) A discussion guide for your next leadership meeting Watch the episode as a team, then work through these questions: 1. Is our AI work led by the CEO, or have we handed it to IT? 2. Which workflow costs us the most time, and what would fixing it be worth? 3. Are we redesigning that workflow with the people who run it, or for them? 4. Where are we verifying more than we're doing, and could we still do the work ourselves? 5. Who on our team knows what good looks like, and are they using AI yet? For question 2, count value in three ways: hard dollars (revenue up or cost down), cost avoidance (spend you no longer need) and value enabling (freed time, which only counts once it goes into work that creates value). WATCH THE FULL EPISODE For The Record, Episode 5: "Ready or not, AI is here" · Atlantic Business Magazine · about 42 minutes, free https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieI_WeVxKZQ Frequently asked questions What is For The Record? For The Record is Atlantic Business Magazine's video podcast. It goes behind the headlines of the biggest stories in the magazine's print edition. Episode 5, "Ready or not, AI is here," features Matt Symes. Where can I watch the episode? Free on YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=ieI_WeVxKZQ. All episodes are listed at atlanticbusinessmagazine.ca/fortherecord. Who should lead AI adoption in an organization? The CEO and the leadership team, working with the people who run each workflow. AI adoption can't be delegated to IT or left to tools alone. Why do AI rollouts stall? Most organizations have the capability and struggle to lead the change. Change made to people breeds change fatigue. Change made with them tends to stick. What does Symplicity Designs do? Symplicity Designs works with leadership teams at small to mid-sized organizations to fix the process first, then build AI into it so the improvement lasts. Atlantic Business Magazine readers voted Symplicity Atlantic Canada's Top Change Agent in 2025. Thank you to Atlantic Business Magazine for giving AI a full episode. We look forward to what's next with them. If your leadership team wants help deciding where to start, talk to us. |
