Business leaders must take direct responsibility for artificial intelligence strategy and cannot afford to delegate those decisions solely to technical teams, according to Karen Abrams, MBA, AA, a doctoral candidate and business executive, who issued the warning in a recent feature examining the risks of leadership disengagement from emerging technologies.
Abrams argues that business leaders occupy a unique vantage point that combines oversight of political, regulatory, and competitive environments with responsibility for financial performance, cash flow, and organisational survival. Unlike employees who can respond to uncertainty by seeking new employment, she noted, business leaders bear the long-term consequences of poor decisions, weak execution, and strategic missteps.
“Risk is not an abstract concept,” Abrams wrote. “It is strategic and deeply personal.”
She cautioned that many leaders perceive artificial intelligence as too complex and therefore surrender strategic decision-making to technical teams, a move she described as dangerous. Abrams cited former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who has said, “AI will be the most transformative technology since electricity. Those who move early will define the future. Those who do not will be defined by it.”
Artificial intelligence (AI), first formally conceptualised in the 1950s at the Dartmouth Conference, was founded on the idea that machines could replicate aspects of human intelligence such as learning and reasoning. Advances in computing power, data availability, and algorithmic design have since pushed AI from theory into widespread practical use. Today, AI systems are increasingly embedded in business operations worldwide, automating processes, enhancing cybersecurity, and reshaping decision-making, productivity, and competitiveness.
Against that backdrop, Abrams stressed that AI strategy is not an information technology project that can be delegated and revisited later. “AI strategy is not a back-office function,” she wrote, warning that leaders who remove themselves from AI decision-making risk undermining the survival of their organizations.
Drawing on her experience with STEMGuyana, a nonprofit organisation operating without a formal IT security department, Abrams described years of persistent cyberattacks that ultimately required the involvement of international technology agencies using advanced AI-driven security systems. She explained that monitored decoy environments, known as honeypots, were deployed to attract attackers, allowing patterns to be analyzed and intelligence gathered.
“These investigations are intricate but remain ongoing,” Abrams noted, adding that cyber threats have been a persistent challenge.
She said the same strategic posture informed STEMGuyana’s approach to AI adoption. According to Abrams, the organization has reduced its reliance on cloud-based spreadsheets and locally stored data files by roughly ninety percent, streamlining registration processing, collapsing turnaround times, and improving operational efficiency during a period of labor shortages.
One of the organisation’s most significant achievements, she said, was the development of a fully integrated end-to-end seminar management system that automates registration, evaluation, and certificate generation. What previously required weeks of manual coordination is now handled at scale, processing hundreds of registrations efficiently.
“This is not incremental improvement,” Abrams wrote. “This is structural change driven by leadership clarity, not technical heroics.”
She also issued a blunt assessment of organisational readiness, stating that development timelines stretching into months and an inability by security teams to clearly explain how AI improves efficiency are signs of deeper structural problems. However, Abrams emphasized that technical teams are not to blame.
“Leadership abdication is,” she wrote.
Abrams concluded that business leaders must understand AI well enough to ask the right questions, insist on documented workflows, and ensure internal data is organised, warning that artificial intelligence amplifies existing strengths and weaknesses. She said the pace of change has already accelerated beyond speculation, with markets, competition, and technology in 2026 diverging sharply from conditions just a few years ago.
“For business leaders in Guyana, this is not a future problem,” Abrams wrote. “It is a present one.”
