In a byline for Dataversity, DataBank SVP of Managed Services Jennifer Curry Hendrickson argues that the next generation of technology leaders will need a fundamentally different skill set than the one that defined their predecessors. Technical credentials remain a baseline expectation — but they are no longer sufficient on their own.

The differentiator, she writes, is digital fluency: the ability to assess, adopt, and integrate new tools as they emerge, and to recognize when a technology represents a genuine opportunity rather than a passing trend. AI has compressed the timeline between emerging capability and essential business requirement faster than most leadership models were built to handle, and leaders who delegate AI strategy entirely to their technology teams risk putting their organizations at a competitive disadvantage.

“The organizations pulling ahead are not always the ones with the largest AI budgets. They’re the ones with leaders who understood what these tools could do early enough to act on it.”

— Jennifer Curry Hendrickson, SVP of Managed Services, DataBank

Hendrickson points to the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT as a turning point that caught most organizations off guard — and notes that many are still catching up. Only 26% of companies believe they have the capabilities to generate measurable value from AI, according to Boston Consulting Group research, a gap she attributes less to technology shortfalls than to leadership that waited too long to build the internal knowledge required to move quickly.

The piece closes with a call for leaders to develop genuine, hands-on fluency rather than observing AI from a distance — experimenting personally, running low-stakes pilots, and building organizational cultures where adaptation is a shared instinct rather than a top-down directive.

Read the full article at Dataversity.