Developing AI Leadership Competencies While Supporting Organization Capacity Building

In this research-to-practice full paper, we present the third iteration of our educational framework that advances AI-informed leadership - a much-needed competency in this era of rapid AI transformation. Our study aimed to evaluate our proposed content and pedagogy and whether it can be made widely accessible to non-technical leaders. We focused on modifying our existing curriculum and research protocol based on the feedback and learnings from our previous workshops. Our current workshop is part of an AI-Education program developed by MIT aiming to provide AI education to the U.S Air Force, which is one of the largest organizations in the US. Previous two iterations of the workshop aimed to offer an introduction to AI to U.S Air Force leaders, while the current iteration's goals are twofold: offering the updated content to U.S Air Force leaders, and supporting their capacity building by preparing a cohort of workshop trainers, who will lead the future iterations of the program inhouse. We conducted the workshop with over 50 participants, including 10 facilitators who were trained to run future workshops internally. Our comprehensive educational materials, including fa-cilitator guides, student-facing documents, and digital resources, support this scalable model. The results demonstrate significant improvements in AI knowledge and leadership competencies, including AI mindset, culture, and ethos. Our findings affirm the effectiveness of experiential learning methodologies and underscore the potential for scalable, sustainable AI education within large organizations through the facilitators' feedback.