Your team doesn't know what an AI agent is (and that's your problem to fix)

Welcome to another edition of Leading Momentum, where we cover on-the-ground insights leaders need to know about getting AI operations to work in their organization.

Today, we made a special thing for you!

Inspired by a handful of calls and closed-door convos over the past few weeks, we made a video really breaking down what leaders need to know about AI vs Agents vs Skills. I’ll give the gist here, but you can watch the full video on YouTube here:

I keep hearing the same thing from leaders right now. Their team is "using AI" but nobody can actually explain what that means. And when someone brings up agents, half the room nods and the other half quietly panics.

Here's why that matters to you as a leader:

If your people can't articulate the difference between AI, agents, and skills, they can't make good decisions about where to invest time. They'll either over-buy tools they don't need, or under-use the ones they have.

So let us give you a framework you can hand your team this week.

There are three layers, and your team needs all three.

AI is the brain. It reasons, generates, and answers questions. But it needs a human driving it. This is where most of your team is right now. They're chatting with Claude or ChatGPT, getting decent results, and doing a lot of manual cleanup afterward. Every time feels like starting from scratch.

Agents are the brain with the ability to act on its own (with agency!). They can take multiple steps, use tools, and complete tasks without someone typing every instruction. But here's the part leaders miss: agents exist on a spectrum. On one end, your team is copy-pasting into a chat window. On the other end, fully autonomous systems run without anyone in the room. Most of what your business actually needs lives in the middle.

Skills are the process you hand the agent. This is the part that changes everything for a leader. A skill tells the agent how your company does things.

Without skills, every person on your team is freelancing with AI. They're getting different results every time, and quality depends entirely on whoever wrote the prompt that day. That's not a system. That's hope.

With skills, you have a repeatable standard that anyone on the team can run. The AI follows your process. The output is consistent. And you're not the bottleneck for every piece of quality work.

And you can push skills very far - that’s a lot of our playbooking methodology.

I just published a video breaking this down with a real example. If you want to share something with your team that explains AI vs agents vs skills in plain language, this is it: https://youtu.be/g_WBPPFhjyc

But here's the leadership move I actually want you to make this week:

Pick one process your team runs regularly where the quality depends on who does it. Proposals, client onboarding, content creation, whatever it is. Ask yourself: if I wrote down exactly how our best person does this, could I hand that to an AI agent as a playbook?

If yes, you just found your first playbook. And that playbook is worth more than any agent you could buy, because it captures how YOUR business works.

The agent is not the magic. The playbook is the magic.

Thanks for reading. It's a privilege that you spend time with these each week.

Whenever you're ready, here's how we can help:

Cheers,
Rachel