AI transformation starts at the top: Closing the VP leadership gap on AI

TOGETHER WITH

Boost your leadership’s AI confidence. General Assembly's AI for Leaders program gives your senior leaders the skills, confidence, and accountability to lead AI transformation. See how training works.

AI is changing the way your people work. Your teams are using it. Your workflows are driven by it. But one very important group is getting left behind.

Yep, we’re talking about your senior leaders. All the leaders responsible for driving transformation, innovation, and AI adoption in your organization are the ones struggling to keep up.

In fact, fewer than a third of leaders regularly apply it to their own strategic decision-making, according to a 2026 survey by General Assembly and Ezra.

Most senior leaders simply haven’t had access to leadership-specific AI training. That’s where General Assembly (GA) comes in. Their AI for Leaders program trains your senior leadership in the AI skills and know-how they need to drive AI adoption across the organization.

We teamed up with GA to break down how their AI for Leaders program works. Here’s our full deep dive.

Boost their confidence

According to a 2026 survey by General Assembly and Ezra, only 58% of VPs feel confident using AI securely. That lack of confidence leads to inconsistent decision-making and stalled AI initiatives across the entire organization. And that lack of confidence comes from a lack of expertise.

That’s why GA helps build foundational AI literacy through their AI for Leaders program, which covers everything from AI concepts and strategy to governance and prompt engineering. The program also includes additional training through live, hands-on sessions and one-on-one executive coaching via Ezra, an award-winning coaching platform.

With the strong foundation that GA can help your leadership team build, they’ll feel way more confident in their AI abilities and be much more prepared to put AI to work at your organization.

Show them the strategy

Most leaders use AI to search, summarize, and draft emails, with fewer than 30% applying it to scenario planning, org design, or financial modeling, according to a 2026 survey by General Assembly and Ezra.

That gap in strategy when it comes to AI usage? That’s what’s holding most organizations back when it comes to scaling AI across your organization. So, GA made sure their AI for Leaders program would give the executives you’re responsible for developing the deep understanding of AI they need to use it more strategically.

The key isn’t just to use AI. Your leadership needs to know how to use AI in the most practical, effective way possible.

Let it trickle down

It all starts at the top, which is why leadership capability is so important in the first place. And, of course, we’ve got the stats from the survey to back this up, too.

According to a 2026 survey by General Assembly and Ezra, leaders who attended leadership-specific AI training were significantly more likely to:

• have teams using AI regularly (96% vs. 82%)
• restructure workflows around AI (68% vs. 52%)
• understand secure AI usage (88% vs. 58%)

GA’s AI for Leaders program gives your senior leaders the working knowledge to evaluate AI investments, frame AI problems, and make decisions they can defend. It helps your leaders use AI to determine how your organization operates so they’ll be ready to put AI to work in the decisions that establish how your org hires, invests, and grows.

Level up your leadership team

AI transformation at the organizational level takes more than just a few AI tools. It needs leaders who truly understand AI, know how to use it strategically, and are prepared to lead their teams with confidence.

Most organizations have an AI strategy. Fewer have leaders who know how to resource it, communicate it to their teams, or make the calls that move it forward. By training and equipping executives with expertise, fluency, and accountability, GA helps your leadership team build an organization that really succeeds with AI.

With GA’s training, you can give your leaders the expertise they need to build a strategic, daily AI practice that changes how they run meetings, evaluate options, and brief their executive boards.

Tech is just one part of the equation. Your leadership team is what makes the biggest difference between having AI and actually using AI to its full advantage.

See how training works.