Hey friends,
Over the years, I’ve sat in countless boardrooms where leaders talk about technology strategy. New systems. New platforms. New consultants. New roadmaps.
And yet, despite all of that investment, something still feels missing. Because the real transformation rarely comes from the technology itself.
It comes from one person inside the organisation who understands how to use it.
During a conversation on The Dumb Monkey Show with Ramon Rodriguez, this idea became incredibly clear to me.
What Ramon represents is something many businesses don’t realise they need yet. An AI champion.
The New Superstar Inside Modern Organisations
In football, every team hopes for that one player who changes the game. The Messi. The Ronaldo.
Someone who sees the field differently. Someone who creates opportunities others simply don’t notice.
Inside organisations, a very similar role is starting to emerge.
These are people who understand the business deeply. They understand how the company works, where the friction lives, where time is wasted, where information gets stuck.
But they also understand AI. Not academically. Not theoretically. Practically. They know how to apply AI tools to real problems inside the organisation. And that combination is incredibly powerful.
Because when someone understands both the business and the technology, they become something rare. They become an amplifier.
A Simple Example That Says A Lot
Ramon shared a small example that perfectly captures this shift. Part of his role involves gathering information and presenting it to executives and boards. Traditionally, that meant building presentation decks.
Anyone who has done this knows what it involves. Collecting data. Formatting slides. Building charts. Rearranging layouts. Five or six hours disappears quickly. Today, Ramon does something different.
Instead of building a static slide deck, he asks Claude Code to generate an interactive HTML dashboard. Market intelligence. Financial models. Risk tools.
All presented as a dynamic interface that executives can explore themselves. The entire thing takes him about ten to fifteen minutes.
And when people see it, their reaction is always the same.
“Wait… is this a website?” No. Just code generated by AI. But the real story here isn’t the tool. It’s the thinking.
Clearing The Invisible Clutter
Ramon shared another example that made me smile.
His computer files had become chaotic. Documents everywhere. Downloads piling up. Client folders scattered.
Instead of manually organising everything, he built a small script that automatically sorts files, structures folders and even helps organise his calendar.
Nothing glamorous. But incredibly useful. Because many of the things that slow us down aren’t big strategic problems.
They’re small pieces of mental clutter. The tiny tasks that interrupt focus again and again. AI is remarkably good at removing that friction.
The Most Surprising Part
At one point I asked Ramon a simple question.
“How many courses did you take to learn all this?”
His answer? None.
He learned by experimenting. By trying tools. By applying them to his daily work. That’s an important point. This skillset is not limited to developers or engineers.
Some of the most effective AI champions I see inside organisations are not technical people at all.
They are operations managers. Analysts. Consultants. Marketers. People who understand how the business actually works.
Why Every Organisation Needs An AI Champion
This brings me to a challenge for business leaders.
You can hire consultants to design your AI strategy. You can hire agencies to build AI agents. You can invest in platforms and infrastructure. But none of that replaces something essential.
Someone inside the organisation who understands the business well enough to identify the real opportunities.
Someone embedded in the day-to-day work.
Someone who can spot where AI can save time, reduce friction, or unlock entirely new capabilities.
Without that internal champion, even the best strategy struggles to gain traction.
Your First Leadership Challenge
So the first question for leaders becomes:
Who is your AI champion?
It might not be the CTO. It might not be the CIO.
In many organisations, the most effective champion is someone who sits closer to operations. Someone who understands how the work actually flows.
Your job as a leader is to identify those people and give them the space to experiment.
Your Second Leadership Challenge
Once you find them, the next question becomes even more important.
How do you keep them?
People who combine business knowledge with AI capability are becoming incredibly valuable. Every organisation will want them.
So leaders need to think carefully about how they retain and motivate these individuals.
Give them interesting problems. Let them experiment. Recognise the value they create.
Your Third Leadership Challenge
And then comes the real opportunity.
Scaling their impact.
If one AI champion is improving processes in a single department, that’s useful. But if their knowledge spreads across the entire organisation, the results multiply. Encourage them to share what they learn.
Let them collaborate across teams. Create internal communities where people explore AI together. This is how capability spreads.
A Personal Challenge For You
Finally, this message isn’t just for leaders. It’s for anyone building a career right now.
The question is simple. How do you become the superstar inside your team?
The good news is that the barrier to entry is lower than most people think. You can start learning on YouTube. You can explore tools on your own. Or you can follow structured programs like the ones we’ve built inside the Dumb Monkey AI Academy.
But the real secret isn’t the course. It’s the application.
Start using AI in your daily work. Experiment. Break things. Improve processes. If you do that consistently, something interesting happens.
Within a few months, people start coming to you with questions.
“How did you do that?”
“Can you help us automate this?”
“Can you show the team what you built?”
That’s the moment you realise you’ve become the AI champion.The Messi inside your organisation.
See you next week
— Aamir
📲 Resources & Links
🎧 Listen to the Podcast Episode 1 on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
📘 Book: The CEO Who Mocked AI (Until It Made Him Millions) by Aamir Qutub