In the AI era, change is happening overnight and we as business leaders spend a lot of time talking about the pace of change. But as I reflect on the conversations coming out of our recent gathering of executive leaders from dozens of companies at the McLaren Technology Centre, I came away more convinced than ever that the hardest problems in AI aren’t the technical ones at all.
Technology is the foundation of what everything else runs on, and Cisco’s job is to make it something you can build on without a second thought. But the discussions that defined the day weren’t about technology infrastructure. They were about two far more human questions: can we trust this and can our people rise to it?
Trust isn’t a checkpoint anymore
For most of my career, trust in technology was a fairly settled question. A tool did what you told it to, the same way every time. What struck me most about the conversations that came out of the event is how completely AI has changed that. Now we’re asking people to trust something that reasons, acts, and sometimes surprises us.
There are really two trust questions playing out at once. The first is personal: will an employee actually trust an AI co-pilot enough to lean on it, challenge it, and let it into their daily work? Andrew McHutchon, McLaren Racing’s Head of Data Science, made a point that stuck with me. He shared that people often hold back, not because the tool isn’t good, but because they’re afraid of getting something wrong or breaking a rule. If your people don’t feel safe experimenting, they won’t, and all that potential sits idle.
The second is organizational: can we trust agents to carry out the tasks we hand them in the right way? That’s a higher bar, and it doesn’t hold still. As Neil Taylor, SVP of AI and Strategy at Mastercard, described it, the models underneath us change constantly, often without anyone telling us. Governance can no longer be a one-time gate you pass through; it must be a “24-7 permanent fixture.” Trust in the AI era isn’t a milestone you reach. It’s a discipline you maintain for as long as the system is live.
But here’s the part I keep coming back to. The instinct, when trust feels fragile, is to lock everything down. And yet the argument I found most compelling was the opposite. The winning move is a paved, safe path where people are genuinely free to experiment, precisely because the guardrails are already built in. As Andrew McHutchon put it, you want to be able to tell your teams to “go wild,” and mean it, because you’ve done the hard work of making the environment safe underneath them. Trust, done right, doesn’t slow innovation. It’s what makes bold innovation possible.
Talent is the hardest variable
If trust was the theme that reframed my thinking, talent was the one that clearly generated the most energy, and frankly, the most honesty.
The panel on the human side of AI opened with a challenge to the entire premise of the day: the instinct to go faster. The speakers argued that the best organizations, build in “organizational pit stops”— deliberate moments to pause, recalibrate, and realign before accelerating again. In a room full of leaders competing to move fast, that landed.
Then came the data, and it was humbling. Tom Harris, Partner for AI and Data at Deloitte, shared findings from a survey of 25,000 employees: only 12% use AI more than once a day, roughly 40% of regular users had received no training at all, and only two in five employees trusted their own leaders’ ability with AI. Sit with that last one for a moment. We talk endlessly about model capability, but the binding constraint isn’t the technology, it’s fluency, confidence, and leadership.
Adrian Thompson, CTO of Arsenal Football Club, framed it in a way I keep returning to. The fundamentals you look for in great people—like curiosity, the drive to ask smart questions, and the willingness to think critically—haven’t changed. Technical skills will move and migrate as they always have. The human qualities that separate the best are the same ones that mattered a decade ago. They just matter more now.
That’s the conclusion I’ve landed on, and I believe it deeply: AI doesn’t replace human potential; it raises the stakes for it. The role of a leader is shifting right along with it, from being the person with all the answers to being the person who asks the right questions.
Insights from the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team
There’s a reason the McLaren Technology Centre was the right place to have these conversations. Formula 1 is a discipline where trust and talent are tested in real time, at 200 miles per hour, with milliseconds to decide. Dan Keyworth, Executive Director, Performance Technology & Systems, McLaren Racing, put it plainly: you can have the best technology and the best game plan, but without good people and a strong culture around it, you’ll never succeed on track.
The car is only as fast as the people and the judgment behind it, which we will get to see on display as the second half of this year’s Formula 1 season gets started next week. The McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team and every team on the grid will push to turn data, discipline, and human instinct into results. That’s the same challenge every one of us faces in the enterprise, just without the champagne. The technology gives us the foundation, but trust and talent are what determine whether we win with it. Our expanded partnership with the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team is built on exactly that belief: performance at the edge of what’s possible depends on getting the human questions right, not just the technical ones.
The conversation is just getting started —watch the full sessions
The most valuable part of a day like this isn’t the slides. It’s hearing how leaders across industries are wrestling with these questions and realizing how many of us are wrestling with the same ones.
We’re not letting the conversation end at the finish line. Over the coming months, we’ll be bringing more of these voices from leaders navigating trust, talent, and the real work of AI adoption into the open. If the questions of “can we trust this” and “can our people rise to it” are keeping you up at night too, you’re in good company. Watch the full recordings to hear more from our high-speed AI event, and let’s keep the conversation going.
