Why Your AI Strategy Depends On Your Team Leads

InnovationWhy Your AI Strategy Depends On Your Team LeadsByMaksim Belov,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 04, 2026, 09:45am EDTMaksim Belov is chief technology officer of Coherent Solutions. gettyConsider two teams working on the same project. One is using AI to generate, test, validate rollback scenarios and execute database migration scripts with minimal supervision. The implementation effort is high, but the risk of failure is relatively low. Another team is treating that same database migration as the last place AI should operate autonomously, because the risk and blast radius are too high. The key question was never whether to use AI; it was how much autonomy to allow in a specific context, and who is positioned to make that call. That person is the team lead.A CTO can define strategy, tools, governance and broad policy, but “use AI here, not there” means something different on every product, module, client environment and domain. Only someone who knows the product and the domain constraints of that specific engagement can make the right call about how much latitude to give AI. What Good Looks LikeThe standard indicators of a well-functioning team still apply in an AI-native environment: short cycle times, high quality and strong user satisfaction. But teams that are succeeding with AI are adjusting where and how much discretion to allow, and revisiting that calibration constantly.Over the last year or two, many organizations have been experimenting, normalizing tools, building maturity models and documenting AI development. The shift now is that customers and product organizations routinely expect AI-assisted delivery, and the question is increasingly becoming how organizations translate AI capability into solid results.​​​​​A good team lead weighs the cost of execution against the cost of a mista...