Building an AI-Relevant Leadership Brand

Sixty-six million years ago, a rock the size of a small city hit the Yucatan Peninsula and instantly changed the world that had existed for 165 million years. The dinosaurs succumbed not because they were weak, but because they were optimized for a world that no longer existed. In the changed world, a small, warm-blooded, adaptable creature dug into the dirt, survived the long winter, and eventually became... you.

This is not a technology article. It is an article about survival. About leadership. About what it means to remain relevant.

Artificial intelligence is our meteor. It has already hit. It did not announce itself and it did not ask permission. In the span of about three years, it moved from novelty to infrastructure. McKinsey's 2026 global survey found that nearly nine in ten organizations now use AI regularly in at least one business function, yet only 37 percent can point to any impact on their bottom line. In other words, almost everyone has touched it, and very few have finished adapting to it. That gap is where leadership brands are being made and lost right now.

The meteor metaphor does double duty. It points to how instantaneous change can wipe you out, and it points to how adaptability and perseverance get you to stable ground. Latino professionals have never had the luxury of waiting for the world to stabilize. We have always been asked to perform in rooms that were not built for us, to lead without maps, to adapt before adaptation was fashionable. That is the exact skill set the next decade demands from everyone.

Right now, leaders across every industry are standing in two groups. One group is waiting to see what happens next. The other group is evolving.

You Are Not Behind... Yet

Here is the first lie people tell themselves amidst chaos: I will figure this out once things settle down.

Things are not going to settle down. That is the entire point. The impact of AI is not the single event to manage. It is a continuous shift in how work gets done, how members expect to be served, and how boards judge whether their executives are ready for what comes next. The tools you learn this quarter will be replaced by better ones next quarter. Waiting for a stable version of the technology is like the dinosaurs waiting for the sky to clear.

The association world is feeling this acutely. ASAE's August 2025 Insight Update on AI in associations found that 85 percent of association executives felt only somewhat prepared, or not very prepared, to navigate the impacts of AI. In a March 2026 Associations Now article, nearly 65 percent of association leaders identified a lack of internal expertise as their top barrier to AI adoption. Read those two findings together and the picture is clear. The tools are in the building. The confident leadership is not. That is a vacuum, and vacuums get filled by whoever moves first.

The leaders who thrive in the next decade will not be the ones who understand every AI tool. They will be the ones who build the habit of adaptation into their quarterly rhythm. They will be the ones who make their learning visible, which does not mean collecting certificates. It means sharing what they are trying, what worked, and what did not, in front of their teams, their boards, and their industry. And they will be the ones who treat uncertainty not as a threat to manage but as a signal to move: when something feels unfamiliar, that is the cue to go learn it, not the cue to avoid it.

The dinosaurs were not bad at being dinosaurs. They were excellent at it. That was the problem. Excellence at the old game creates a powerful incentive to keep playing it. The membership director who runs flawless renewal campaigns, the education leader whose annual conference always sells out, the CEO whose board loves the status quo: each of them can be resistant to change but has the strongest reasons to do so. Competence in the old world is not protection in the new one. Sometimes it is the very thing that keeps you from noticing the world has changed.

The Quarterly Evolution Framework

Stop setting annual goals. Annual goals were designed for stable environments, where the assumptions you make in January still hold in December. Strategy researchers have been saying this for more than a decade. Rita McGrath, writing in Harvard Business Review, argued that lasting competitive advantage has become rare and that leaders should plan around shorter cycles of experimentation, learning, and reconfiguration (especially in this AI world). You do not live in a stable environment. Your planning cycle should reflect that.

Instead, run in quarters. Each quarter is a small evolution cycle. Four questions, four categories, one honest hour of planning. This is a framework I developed and use with my own team at Ninja Tropic, and one I have shared with association clients who felt stuck between doing nothing and doing everything. It is deliberately simple, because simple is what survives a full calendar.

Imagine Marisol, a Latina VP of Membership at a mid-size healthcare association. She is not a technologist. She has a full calendar, a team she is responsible for, and a board that keeps asking about AI without knowing exactly what they asking. She is the person this framework is built for. Here is how she uses it.

Experiments. Marisol picks one AI tool per quarter and uses it on something real. Not a demo. Not a webinar. Real work. This quarter, she runs her last three years of member surveys through a language model and looks for patterns she never had time to find manually. The experiment is not about the output. It is about what she learns by doing it. She writes down what she expected. She writes down what actually happened. That gap is her learning.

Courses. Marisol still needs structured learning, but she is ruthless about what she chooses. She does not need a computer science degree. She needs AI fluency, not technical mastery. She looks for courses that teach her how to think about AI systems, prompt construction, ethical frameworks for automated decision-making, and data literacy. Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and associations like ASAE offer leadership-level AI literacy tracks. She commits two to four hours of structured learning per quarter, and she applies it immediately to the experiment she is already running, so the course and the experiment reinforce each other.

Events. Marisol goes to one event per quarter where AI is not the whole topic but is part of the conversation. Not an AI conference. A healthcare summit, a housing policy forum, a gathering like Conexiones where the real conversations happen in the margins between sessions. She listens to how people in adjacent spaces are failing and succeeding. The leaders who adapt fastest are not the ones who study AI in isolation. They are the ones who see how it lands in real organizational contexts, in rooms where the stakes are real and the decisions are messy.

Networking. This is the part Marisol already knows how to do. Like most Latino professionals, she built her career through trust, through reciprocity, through showing up for people before anyone asked. That is exactly how she approaches AI learning. Each quarter she finds three people who are further along than she is and talks to them, not to extract their knowledge in one meeting, but to build the kind of ongoing relationship where thinking happens out loud. Her monthly Cafecito with two other leaders who are also figuring this out is worth more to her than any conference panel. The loneliest thing in leadership is feeling like you are the only one who does not know what is happening. Marisol is not, and neither are you. Everyone is figuring this out. The ones who do it faster are the ones who stop pretending otherwise and start talking.

Your Brand Is What You Do in Public

A brand is a promise. What promise are you making to your industry?

Right now, most association leaders have an invisible AI strategy. They are thinking about it privately. They are worried about it quietly. They are making decisions about it in closed rooms.

For Latino leaders, that silence is an opening. Thought leadership in this moment does not require being the most technical person in your field. It requires being one of the few willing to think out loud while everyone else waits behind closed doors. Our community has a long history of leading from the margins and turning constraints into creativity. If nobody in the room is willing to be seen working through AI in real time, the room stays stuck. You can be the one who changes that.

The leaders who will define their industries in the next decade are the ones who make their thinking visible now, before they have it all figured out. Write the LinkedIn post about the AI experiment that did not work. Give the conference talk about the three questions you are still trying to answer. Submit the piece to La Esquinita about what you are learning, what surprised you, what you wish someone had told you a year ago. You do not need to be an expert to lead. You need to be willing to be in the arena while others are watching from the parking lot.

Visibility is not vanity. Visibility is influence. And influence, right now, belongs to the leaders who are willing to say out loud what everyone else is only thinking.

The Practical Truth

Here is what this looks like on a Tuesday afternoon.

You block ninety minutes. You open a document and answer four questions. What is my AI experiment this quarter? What course or learning commitment am I making? What event will push my thinking? Who am I going to talk to?

You write it down. You tell someone. You do it.

Then, at the end of the quarter, you spend thirty minutes writing honestly about what you learned. Not for your organization. For yourself. What shifted? What surprised you? What are you now ready to do that you were not ready to do three months ago?

That is evolution. That is what the warm-blooded creatures did while the dinosaurs waited for the world to return to normal.

Latino leaders have always been asked to adapt to worlds that were not designed with us in mind. That changes now. We are not adapting to someone else's future. We are building our own.

The world is not returning to normal. It is becoming something new.

And we are the ones who will shape what that something becomes.

References

McKinsey & Company, The State of AI in 2026: On the Road to ROI, August 2026. mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai

ASAE, Insight Update: AI in Associations, August 2025. my.asaecenter.org/product/insight-update-ai-in-associations

Tori Miller Liu and Tommy Goodwin, "AI as Strategic Enabler: How Association Leaders Can Catch Up," Associations Now, March 2026. asaecenter.org

Rita Gunther McGrath, "Transient Advantage," Harvard Business Review, June 2013. hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage

About the Author

Erick Prospero is the founder and CEO of Ninja Tropic eLearning, an award-winning company that helps associations, nonprofits, and enterprise organizations transform education into a measurable business asset. With over 15 years in the association space, including running a learning department at an association early in his career, Erick brings a perspective that sits at the intersection of instructional strategy and organizational relevance. His work has earned consistent recognition from Brandon Hall Group, eLearning Industry, and other major industry institutions. He is a frequent speaker, podcast host, and industry contributor focused on AI-powered learning, content strategy, and building educational programs that drive real revenue for membership organizations. He is currently writing a book on AI-powered educational content production and the business of building profitable learning products.

Learn more at ninjatropic.com.