What we talked about
Charlene Li joins Federico Ramallo for a special 100th-episode conversation on disruptive leadership, business transformation, and her upcoming book Winning with AI. Charlene shares how she “fell into” being an analyst and author:starting at Forrester in 1999 after stepping back from running businesses to focus on family:then building a career at the front edge of major tech disruptions: the internet, search, social media, and now generative AI.
Show notes
Charlene Li dropped the book she was working on the moment ChatGPT launched, because she recognized it immediately as the same kind of interface breakthrough that she had watched transform the internet, social media, and search, and she knew that whoever understood it first would have a real advantage. That pattern-recognition instinct, sharpened across twenty-five years of watching disruption unfold, is what shapes her framework for winning with AI.
What we covered
- “Winning” is not a universal definition, it means whatever your organization’s definition of success actually is, whether that’s beating competitors, serving customers better, or achieving something specific to your mission as a school, hospital, bank, or nonprofit. The critical first step is knowing what winning means before asking what AI should do.
- Speed is the new moat. When everyone has access to the same technology and data, the only sustainable competitive advantage is how fast an organization can adopt AI and, more importantly, adapt its people, culture, and processes to the changes AI brings.
- The 90-day plan is not a replacement for long-term strategy, it’s a way to build a rolling 18-month AI roadmap in manageable increments, reviewing and adjusting each quarter, because the strategy is written in ink but the plan is written in pencil.
- The hyperscalers, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, will invest nearly $400 billion in AI this year, while enterprise spending is roughly $37 billion, a 10x gap that signals an AI bubble of expectations even if the underlying technology transformation is real and irreversible.
- The hardest people change with AI is identity disruption: a bank went from 90 people in a check-reading group to five, and the remaining challenge is not the technology but helping people answer “who am I now?” when the role they built their identity around no longer exists at scale.
- AI fluency in 2026 requires four levels: understanding what AI can and cannot do, using it responsibly, applying it to actual job tasks, and being able to teach it to someone else, because teaching crystallizes knowledge and forces the kind of organized thinking that makes skills stick.
About Charlene Li
Charlene Li is a New York Times bestselling author of six books and the founder of Quantum Networks Group, an advisory firm focused on business transformation and disruptive leadership. She has advised 49 of the Fortune 100 and previously founded Altimeter Group and served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleneli
- Website: https://charleneli.com
Episode 100 of the PreVetted Podcast.