ABBC Member ChangeSchool, Content Partner for Executive Offsite Vol. 1

ChangeSchool joined Staff.am as Content Partner for Executive Offsite Vol. 1, a closed-door afternoon in Yerevan. Around forty-five Armenian CEOs, founders and board members came, by invitation only. They came to discuss one hard question: how do you run and grow a company when the world around it is changing so fast? 

ChangeSchool's Managing Director, Viren Lall, opened with a conversation with Ralph Yirikian, CEO of Ucom. They talked about how AI is changing the way leaders make decisions, how money becomes harder to raise in uncertain times, and what inside a company quietly slows it down. One question kept coming back: how do you think well next to a machine that thinks differently from you? ChangeSchool sees three patterns in almost every group of senior leaders. First, the time AI saves often goes to easy tasks, not important ones. Second, the leaders who gain the most are the ones willing to feel like a beginner again. Third, and worst, people stop checking the AI's work and simply accept it. Two in five pieces of AI-assisted work come back below standard, and more than half are sent anyway. This is a thinking problem, not a tool problem.

The afternoon was not only about AI. Armenia's Minister of Finance, Vahe Hovhannisyan, spoke with Staff.am's Luiza Avetisyan about how a company can stay stable and still grow when money is tight. A panel of senior leaders then discussed which old rules about running a company no longer work. After that, under the Chatham House Rule, everyone split into four small tables, on geopolitics, AI, governance and money, and tested their own ideas with their peers.

ChangeSchool works with leaders in thirty-nine countries on the thinking habits that decide how well AI is used, and holds the EFMD 2025 Silver Award for programme quality. If you are an ABBC member interested in executive development, leadership pipelines or partnerships in Armenia, their Country Director Narine Gishyan would be glad to talk, at narine@changeschool.org. More is at changeschool.org.