AI Strategy: Use These Three Roles to Repivot Yourself

Leverage AI to repivot to reimagine yourself

8/26/25

STRATEGY

Remember when email felt revolutionary? Or when Slack promised to kill email? We’ve rolled with plenty of tech changes at work. But AI requires more than adaptation—it challenges us to repivot to reimagine yourself in an AI-powered workplace. Following repivot best practices, we can develop the digital leadership skills needed for this transformation.

Most of us are comfortable being practitioners in our field. But making AI work for you requires thinking bigger – like a manager building systems, or an entrepreneur spotting opportunities. Sound intimidating? It’s not. Let me show you how breaking down your work into these three modes can help you systematically transform how you work with AI.

Let’s start where most of us are most comfortable—as practitioners in our field. This is where systematic adaptation begins.

The Technician: The Skilled Practitioner

Skilled practitioners are experts who have mastered their craft. When exploring AI, they should test its limits with questions. And, if venturing into unknown areas with AI, be sure to validate. AI’s value lies in helping you do what you already know—faster, more efficiently, or from a new perspective—without overriding your expertise.

Every expert starts somewhere. Before automating complex work tasks, I experimented with AI on my personal writing and research. That’s where I learned to test, validate, and build confidence in AI’s capabilities.

Go Deeper:

  • Test AI to see its impact your workflow. Does it speed gathering inputs for your report? Generate the final report? Help with analysis? It probably won’t meet your expectations for all three.
  • Trust-but-verify: AI speeds routine work, but results must meet your criteria (quality, security, regulations).
  • Edge-case questions: let AI surface rare scenarios or alternative approaches, then you judge and implement.

For example, while writing this post, I use AI to review structure, language, and examples. It suggested the “Go Deeper” sections you’re seeing. But I make the final decisions.

The Manager: The Systems Builder

Having digital leadership skills is essential - building systems

Managers design clear, repeatable processes. At work, every task can feel like a special case—but start with your personal routines. That’s where you’ll discover the power of turning habits into systems. When you can document a process that works for you, you’ve built the foundation for AI collaboration. What begins as a personal workflow can evolve into an AI-powered system that maintains reliability while expanding your creative potential.

Go Deeper:

  • Start small: Pick a personal task you repeat often. Document your process, even if it seems obvious.
  • Look for patterns: Which parts of your workflow stay the same? Those are candidates for systematizing.
  • Test and refine: Once you have a documented process that works for you, experiment with having AI handle pieces of it..

I started by documenting my personal writing process—how I organize ideas, draft sections, and edit. Once I saw the pattern, I built a custom GPT to help with each step. Now it helps me transform any frequent task into clear SOPs, one small piece at a time.

The Entrepreneur: The Visionary

the entrepreneur is an expert in repivot best practices

Once you’ve built systems that work, you start seeing bigger possibilities. The visionary thrives by staying relentlessly curious—taking those personal experiments and asking “what if?” What starts as a simple workflow could become your next breakthrough.

Go Deeper:

  • We are the entrepreneurs of our careers. Where can AI help you identify overlooked opportunities and areas for growth?
  • How are you keeping up with the explosion of AI tools, techniques, and strategies? Pick a reputable source like Every, McKinsey, or your favorite LinkedIn writers.
  • Create personal workflows using AI tools to capture and transform ideas from podcasts and videos into mind maps and flashcards to accelerate your learning.

Here’s my learning workflow: Upload reports to Google NotebookLM, convert to audio, and gain insights during daily walks. Perfect for learning on the move.

How to Begin

Start where you’re comfortable—whether that’s testing AI in your personal workflow (Technician), documenting a process that works (Manager), or imagining new possibilities (Entrepreneur). Pick one small task you know well. Test it. Document it. Then let it grow. That’s how you build confidence with AI while honoring your experience. Which role feels like your natural starting point?