In Japanese martial arts, there's a concept that doesn't translate well into Portuguese. It's called zanshin , the attention that remains after the technique has been executed. The strike is over, but the warrior doesn't relax because he knows the moment isn't over yet. The Greeks called practical prudence phronesis , acting at the right moment, neither before nor after.
What these two ideas have in common, separated by centuries and cultures, is the same understanding: readiness is a relationship with time. It cannot be declared. It cannot be bought. It develops and has a rhythm that does not respond to external pressure.
When this concept reached artificial intelligence, the corporate market gave it a new name. They called it "AI Readiness." And, with the same speed that it christened it, it became meaningless.
Call anything that involves adopting AI tools "AI Readiness ." You buy a license, integrate it into some workflow, and presto, the company is ready. It's not.
AI Readiness itself is the ability of an organization to make good decisions about AI, not just to use it. Good decisions cancel out judgment. Judgment takes time to develop. And that time doesn't respond to any purchased license, nor to any trained prompt.
I've been following organizations through this process for some time, and what I almost always see is a disconnect between rhetoric and internal reality. The company seems ready on the slides. It's not ready anywhere that truly matters.
Leadership that lacks the language to communicate with its own base about the fear of being replaced, and therefore silences the issue instead of addressing it. A culture that has never decided what to do about the gap between those who already operate AI fluently and those who don't yet know where to begin: fire them? Retrain them? Demand results without teaching them?
The governance that approved tool offerings without defining who signs off on a decision when the algorithm makes a mistake, and without building the ethical systems that account for it when the error has real consequences. These are some of the places where the inability to make good decisions about AI manifests itself, and, notice, none of them are technological problems.
Research by Russell Reynolds helps illustrate this: 54% of leaders identify technological change as one of the main threats to their organization's health in the next 18 months. However, only 45% invest in their company's own capacity for transformation.
Take a deeper look: the leaders know, intuitively, that the problem isn't technological. It's theirs.
Teenagers are the only people in the world who are simultaneously convinced they know everything and completely unprepared for what's to come. Not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of life experience.
One's repertoire cannot be reduced. There is no such thing as a compressed version of experience. And the curious thing is that he only discovers this when something goes wrong in a way that no advice could have prevented.
Many organizations are at a stage similar to adolescence when it comes to AI — confident enough to declare that they are ready, yet far enough away not to know what they don't know.
Zanshin and phronesis persist because each generation rediscovers from scratch something that urgency tries to erase: readiness has an internal time that does not respond to external pressure. In the context of AI, this has a name. It's called judgment.
Teenagers don't acquire it by reading about it; they acquire it when the world demands it. Organizations do too. The only variable that changes the speed of this process is the quality of those who provide support when the situation becomes too complex to handle.
* Iona Szkurnikis the founder and CEO of Education Journey, a corporate education platform that uses Artificial Intelligence for a personalized learning experience. She holds a master's degree from Stanford University and executive training in AI from Harvard. Iona is also the co-founder of Brasil no Vale do Silício (Brazil in Silicon Valley), a fellow of the Lemann Foundation, and a curator of São Paulo Innovation Week.
