I was doomscrolling through Insta when an octopus playing the piano caught my eye. Every arm knew its job, with the brain at the center coordinating it all.
I looked at my own screen. Ten tabs open. A few chats going. An AI tool running a prompt. A calendar notification telling me I am late.
And I thought: That is what leadership looks like now. We are the octopus.
The juggling has changed. It is no longer just people, projects, and priorities. Now we are managing machines alongside all of it. AI is your co-analyst, your first drafter, your research assistant, your scheduler. The arms are everywhere. Every leader has them. The question is: are we orchestrating our arms or just flailing them?
McKinsey's 2025 survey found that 88% of companies are using AI in at least one business function. But 94% of them report not yet seeing significant value from those investments. Read that again. Nearly everyone has the tools. Almost nobody is getting the return.
That gap tells you everything. The bottleneck is not the technology. It is how leaders are managing it.
The octopus does not succeed because it has eight arms. It succeeds because the brain knows which arm to deploy, when, and for what purpose. Most leaders right now have the arms. They do not have the coordination.
I learned this the hard way. Early on, I treated AI the way a lot of leaders do. I would throw tasks at it and wait for the output. Summarize this. Draft that. Give me talking points for tomorrow. And the outputs would come back impressively fast, but generic. They lacked context. And I was spending almost as much time editing the output as I would have spent doing it myself.
The shift happened when I stopped treating AI as a vending machine and started treating it like a direct report. A capable one. Fast, tireless, and good with information. But one that still needs direction, context, and judgment calls from someone who understands what good looks like.
That is my octopus principle. You are the brain. AI is the arms. And the value is not in how many arms you have, but in how well you direct them.
There is a spectrum to how leaders operate alongside AI right now. Most fall into one of three patterns.
The first is the delegator. This leader outsources their thinking to AI and accepts what comes back with minimal review. It is abdication dressed up as productivity. Over time, their work starts to blend into the noise. Same tools, same output, same voice as everyone else.
The second is the bottleneck. This leader refuses to let AI handle anything meaningful. They do not trust the tool or do not understand it well enough to delegate to it. Either way, they are working harder than they need to and falling behind.
The third is the orchestrator. This leader treats AI as one input among several. They prompt with context. They review with intent. They know which tasks benefit from AI speed and which ones require human depth. They run multiple workstreams simultaneously, not because they are doing everything, but because they have learned to direct the arms while keeping their own hands on the work that matters most.
In a season where AI can produce volume faster than any human, the leader's edge is no longer speed. It is taste. Knowing what to keep, cut, and reshape.
Here is the practical side. Orchestrating AI is not magic. It is a system. And like any system, it works when you build it with intention.
Look at your actual week. Sort it into two categories: tasks where speed matters most, and tasks where judgment matters most.
The first category is AI territory. Research, first drafts, data synthesis, scheduling, formatting, comparison analysis. Let the arms handle it.
The second category is yours. Strategic decisions, difficult conversations, coaching, creative direction, relationship building. Keep your hands on those.
The octopus does not succeed by moving all eight arms at once in the same direction. It succeeds because each arm is doing exactly the right thing at the right time, while the brain stays calm at the center.
That is the leadership model now. Not doing more. Directing better. And knowing which arms are yours and which ones belong to AI.