Sidebar Speaker Series: Your executives don't understand AI. That's your problem to solve with Michael Hirsch

​Every company says it's going all in on AI. Then you look up the org chart and the people setting the mandate barely touch the tools. The result is a familiar split: a working level racing to become AI-native, and a leadership level issuing directives disconnected from what the technology actually does. This session argues that closing that gap isn't something you can wait for your executives to do. It falls to the people one level down. You'll leave with concrete moves for pulling leadership into real fluency: the low-risk experiments to run in front of them, the conversations that shift how they see the tools, and ways to make AI capability visible at the level where strategy actually gets set.

​Speaker Bio:

​Michael Hirsch is the founder of Break a Pencil Consulting, where he helps product teams and their leaders build AI into an organizational capability rather than a scatter of individual habits. Across 25 years in product leadership at companies including Sony, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, and HERE Technologies, he watched the same pattern repeat: new tools arrive, individuals get faster, and the team somehow doesn't. His work focuses on closing that gap. He also teaches business strategy as an adjunct professor at the University of Washington's Foster School and Seattle University's Albers School, and writes the Broken Pencils newsletter on AI and product leadership.