AI may be the most-talked-about topic in business, but most of the conversation is happening at the surface while the real issues remain untouched.
To be clear, leaders aren't missing the problem. They're avoiding it because the truth is uncomfortable.
Recent research from the RAND Corporation reveals that over 80% of AI projects fail, which is a rate significantly higher than traditional IT projects. Crucially, the study found that the primary cause of failure isn't technical complexity; it's a fundamental misunderstanding by leadership about the problems theyre trying to solve.
AI feels like a sudden disruption, something new, complex, and external that needs to be solved. In reality, AI is exposing the inner workings of your business.
The illusion of an AI problem
I’ve been spending time with executive teams working through AI in real time. There’s a sense of urgency behind every discussion that seems to circle the same questions: What tools should we use? How fast should we move? What’s our AI strategy?
What’s striking, though, is how quickly the conversation shifts away from AI to something more fundamental. It reveals strategic uncertainty, technology gaps, and operational misalignment.
AI isn’t creating new problems. It’s exposing ones that were already there, forcing conversations that many companies delayed for years. These gaps—unclear objectives, fragmented systems, and inconsistent ways of working—were often hidden behind manual processes that functioned just enough to avoid scrutiny.
Because AI compresses time, what once took months to reveal now surfaces in days and is impossible to ignore.
The first gap: Technology understanding
AI exposes an issue in how leaders understand technology. Many are now making decisions about systems they’ve never treated as core to the business nor that they’ve ever fully grasped.
We’re not even talking about AI yet. We’re still catching up to the systems already running the business. We need to find the green threads that connect everything from your CRM to your financial and communication platforms to your customer’s actual experience.
For years, technology sat next to the business. We treated it as infrastructure, separate from the rest of the company, and delegated its management to functional experts. It wasn’t seen as a strategic driver of business objectives.
Now, that separation no longer holds. AI cuts across everything from operations to marketing, product to sales, and consulting to finance. It requires a different level of engagement from leadership.
The second gap: Business clarity
AI can’t create direction. It only scales whatever direction already exists.
If you have a clear strategy, AI accelerates it. If you don’t, it just becomes a faster way to get to the wrong place.
When organizations start exploring AI, they’re forced to answer questions they’ve often glossed over: What makes us different? Where do we win? What is our unfair advantage? These are simple questions, but they’re rarely answered clearly or consistently across a business.
This is where many organizations get stuck because teams are moving with different assumptions about what actually matters. By layering AI onto this misalignment, teams move in different directions, at varying speeds, and with unclear goals.
Even if your employees complete their work more quickly or efficiently, if it’s the wrong work, your business will never achieve its objectives.
The third gap: New mental models
The most underestimated gap is how we think about control.
AI doesn’t play by the rules most companies were built on. It produces outcomes without always "showing its work," and it introduces a level of unpredictability that our traditional systems were designed to eliminate.
Most of our businesses were built for precision with layers of approval, defined processes, and clear ownership. While that created stability, it also built a massive buffer that slowed us down.
AI effectively removes that barrier.
It’s changing how work gets done and, more importantly, the speed at which we have to move. Decisions that used to meander through structured workflows now require faster judgment and a much higher tolerance for ambiguity.
When we feel that pressure, our instinct is to contain it. In this case, to force AI into our old systems. When it doesn't fit (and it won't), we conclude the technology isn’t ready. But the tension isn’t coming from the tech. It’s coming from the system around it that hasn’t evolved.
We have to trade the illusion of “getting it right” for the reality of learning quickly, moving from gatekeeping to curiosity.
Additionally, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in what expertise looks like. With AI, intelligence becomes a commodity. So the real advantage moves to human judgment: knowing which questions to ask, what to challenge, and what actually matters.
We need new mental models in this new reality. Instead of copy-pasting old skills and structures into a new world, we have to adapt and evolve.
Why it feels so urgent
These fault lines have existed for years. So, why does this moment feel different, more intense than previous tech waves?
Because AI is an accelerant. Decisions are faster, cycles are shorter, and expectations are higher. There’s no longer room for inefficiency, lack of clarity, or manual workarounds.
AI is making visible what’s been missing: that step between ignoring technology to treating everything as an AI problem. Most companies never built this in-between and now the tech is accelerating faster than humans can adapt.
I’ve found that businesses aren’t moving too slowly for AI. They’re simply not structured to move this way at all. A lot of fear and anxiety that leaders feel is more about where to start than it is about AI itself.
But we can’t keep ignoring these gaps or pushing them off until tomorrow.
Our real opportunity is to use this moment to build the capabilities that may or may not have been there all along. That means developing real technology fluency at the leadership level. It’s getting clear on where your business wins and how it creates value. It means evolving how teams think, decide, and collaborate in a more dynamic environment.
We see this most clearly across health and wellness companies where uniting people and brands to inspire health, wellness, and happiness is more than a mission. It’s an operational challenge. When the goal is empowering people to live healthier, happier lives, these gaps become even more critical to solve.
AI makes these fundamentals nonnegotiable.
Our test going forward
We have a tendency to talk about AI as the transformation, but it isn’t. It’s the test of whether a transformation ever actually happened.
Let’s move away from asking how quickly we can adopt AI. It’s time to truthfully answer if we’ve built a business capable of using it. Start by giving your leadership team these questions:
- If we were forbidden from using the word "AI" for six months, what core business friction would we still be obsessing over? Do we have a plan to solve it without a magic tool?
- Can our executive team map the green threads—the actual flow of data and decisions—that connect our CRM to our bottom line?
- In a world where answers are now a commodity, are we still rewarding employees for having the right information? Or, are we building a culture that prizes the curiosity to ask the right questions and the judgment to challenge the machine’s output?
The gap isn’t being created right now. It’s just finally being seen. What you do next determines whether that gap becomes your greatest liability or your most significant advantage.
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