I wrote recently about the feeling of knowing it when you see it, with respect to a leader’s commitment to reinvent their company for the age of AI. In that case, it was a founder so frenetic, so determined, that he was going to push his organization kicking and screaming to AI native.

Today, I met another leader, the CEO of a 300-person company. He was soft spoken and measured. He was not frenetic. He was not jumping up and down. He was not pounding his fist on the table.

But if you dug under the hood, he was immensely curious.

For about a thousand dollars a week in token spend over the summer, he had built a “what is everybody working on” tool that he rolled out to his full org. This is a teacher turned executive. Not an engineer by training. He vibe-coded a dashboard that let each of his people put in what they were working on at the end of the day. It pulled that together against strategic priorities. You could filter by group, by team, by initiative. It was clever. It was thoughtful.

Then it came out that he had configured his own Hermes, a chief of staff he talked to. It helped him with a number of his day-to-day workflows. Helped him drop fewer balls.

There are different flavors of the leadership it takes to push an organization into the next chapter, the AI-first chapter.

This one was not the hair-on-fire version. But he was curious. He had become the de facto frontier guy, the boundary pusher, for his whole team. He had a vision of where he wanted to go, and was leading from the front. He had played with the tools. He had rolled up his sleeves. He had built stuff.

Leadership comes in different flavors. Commitment to AI does too. What is it worth to have a curious person at the top of your org? At Legible, we think it’s worth a lot.

You know it when you see it.