Leading Voices: how CIO Sandra Kujundzic’s teams tame AI volatility and drive real value.

At the age of 24, Sandra became a manager of ten engineers. Authority can be assigned - and she had earned it much earlier than most. But experience can’t be. It’s no surprise that the moment that reshaped her leadership stemmed not from operational failure, but from feedback. 

One of her strongest engineers told her he was leaving because he was not developing enough within the team. That conversation exposed something uncomfortable. She had been leading from expertise. Solving problems. Driving performance. Setting direction. What she had not yet mastered was nurturing growth. Sandra realized that she had been trying to replicate her own approach across the team, assuming that what worked for her would work for everyone. It did not - and that’s when she embraced situational leadership.

Situational leadership requires adjusting your approach based on capability, maturity, and context. It demands awareness of where others are, not where you are. It forces a leader to think beyond personal execution and toward scalable enablement, and the impacts of this lesson went far beyond one team. What she learned with people would later define how she thinks about scaling technology.

Enterprise AI transformation faces the same trap she encountered at 24. It is tempting to scale what works in one environment across the organization. To assume that a pilot’s success translates universally. To deploy tools before teams are ready to absorb them. But AI does not scale through replication alone. It scales through structured attunement. That is why Sandra anchors technology decisions in value.