AI, Outcomes, and Leadership: What Tomorrow’s Disruptive Companies Are Doing Differently | DisrupTV Ep 445

What separates the companies that will define the AI era from those that will be displaced by it? In this episode of DisrupTV, hosts R "Ray" Wang and Vala Afshar bring together two guests with very different vantage points on the same question — one from the front lines of AI-first transformation, and one from the deeply human side of leadership development.

Alejandro Laplana, CEO of Shokworks — the AI-first digital transformation consultancy behind work for HBO, FC Barcelona, and the United Nations — makes the case that the traditional services model is being fundamentally disrupted. The billable hour is giving way to gain-share arrangements where vendors win only when clients win. Middle-market companies ($50M–$500M) are using AI to achieve leverage that once required billions in investment. And the real efficiency gains aren’t in headline automation — they’re in eliminating the coordination tax buried in middle management layers and compliance workflows. He also draws a crucial distinction between operational AI, which improves today’s business, and innovation AI, which builds tomorrow’s competitive moat.

Claire Díaz-Ortiz, who co-authored Why Can’t They Be Like Me? with legendary executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, explores the leadership trap that quietly caps most organizations’ potential: the assumption that what made you successful should work for everyone around you. She explains why homogeneity is innovation’s enemy, where AI genuinely helps in leadership development and where it falls short, and why the strengths that build careers can become the blind spots that limit leadership — if they go unexamined.

Together, they trace a through-line from business model disruption to the human transformation required to lead through it: outcome-obsessed strategy on one side, and the perspective-rich, deliberately curious leadership needed to execute on the other.