Related question
Do I need to be technical to lead an AI initiative?
Short answer
No. You need to be a translator. The gap that kills these projects is not technical skill. It is the space between what AI can do and what your business actually needs. Someone has to stand in that gap, and it does not have to be a coder.
I have said "I am not a coder" hundreds of times across a 30-year career. My strengths were in product design, process organization, and problem solving for clients, then translating all of that into something developers could implement.
In football, games are won and lost in the gaps, in the space between the lines where plays break through. In business, there is a critical language gap between technology and the operation. Technical people and executives speak different languages, and that gap has compounded the difficulty of implementing AI everywhere I look. Executives are drowning in advice about tools, platforms, and dashboards, each promising change and most delivering confusion.
The problem is not the technology. The problem is translation.
You do not need to become a coder to get value from AI. You need someone who closes the gap between the technology and the business outcome. In a period like this one, the advantage belongs to the translators.