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Winning With AI With Charlene Li – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

Episode #1041 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Charlene Li gets into one of the biggest gaps inside most organizations right now: everyone knows AI matters, but far fewer leaders know what to actually do about it. The noise is everywhere. New tools… new models… new headlines. New pressure from boards, teams, competitors and customers. But turning all of that into a coherent business response is a very different challenge. Charlene has spent her career helping leaders understand transformative change before it becomes obvious. She is a New York Times bestselling author, advisor to CEOs and boards, and someone many people first came to know through books like Groundswell, Open Leadership and The Disruption Mindset. Her latest book, Winning With AI – The 90-Day Blueprint For Success, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh, is not another book about what AI is. It is about what leaders should do next. What makes Charlene’s perspective especially useful is that she does not treat AI as a technology project. In fact, one of the strongest ideas in our conversation is that most organizations do not need an “AI strategy” as much as they need to understand how AI serves the business strategy they already claim to have. That shift matters. Otherwise, AI becomes another pilot, another experiment, another internal sandbox that makes everyone feel busy while very little value gets created.

Charlene pushes hard against that.

She argues that leadership teams need to move beyond scattered experimentation and start building real AI roadmaps tied to value creation and customer impact. Not vague transformation theatre. Not executive cosplay. Real choices. Real ownership. Real momentum. In our conversation, we talk about why AI adoption feels so lumpy inside organizations, why pilots may be the wrong model, why HR needs a seat at the table, and why efficiency is only the first and least imaginative use case. We also get into the human layer of AI: anxiety, identity, reskilling, trust, leadership and the possibility that AI could help create more human-centered organizations if leaders are willing to rethink how work actually gets done. Mostly, this is a conversation about responsibility. AI will not magically transform a company because someone bought the right tool. It changes things when leaders understand the work, the people, the strategy and the value they are trying to create.

Listen to my conversation with Charlene Li here: Winning With AI With Charlene Li – TWMJ #1041.

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.