Episode Details

Why AI Isn’t Making Companies Faster

Why AI isn’t making companies faster? Common question I get these days, and the answer isn’t that mysterious. Everybody bought the tools, and ran the pilots, but nothing sped up.

That doesn’t mean the money was wasted, and it doesn’t mean AI is a fraud. AI is an amplifier. What it amplified is a problem we had ten years ago and still haven’t addressed.

The gap between a decision and a customer

There’s a lag between the moment an executive team decides something and the moment a customer actually feels it…the moment it converts to revenue, or to something valuable.

So ask yourself this question – “When did your company last make a real decision? And how long before anyone outside the building noticed?”

Most leaders can’t answer that. That’s the whole problem, and it’s the reason AI isn’t making companies faster no matter how much they’re investing right now.

It was never the technology

Agile is supposedly finished. Has been for a few years now. And yet…lack of agility still shows up in the top five concerns CEOs report every year. They don’t call it agile. They call it speed-to-market, nimbleness, adaptability…the ability to respond when the market moves.

Meanwhile every organization I know is being asked to do the impossible. Extract more value from fewer people. Make cuts where no cuts remain. Faster and cheaper while somehow getting better.

That runs straight into what I learned in my project management days — the holy triangle of budget, time and scope. You don’t get all three. And you certainly don’t cut one and keep quality where it was.

The practical maximum

Here’s where it actually stops. Here’s why AI isn’t making companies faster.

Resistance to change. Risk aversion. No autonomy. Nobody is allowed to make the call. Fear. Those human factors combine into a practical maximum, and no amount of technology can help you move past it.

Give someone a goal tied to their job, their pay and their longevity, and then deny them the authority to make trade-offs, to negotiate, to prioritize. They disengage. They learn to be helpless. Losing control over your own destiny is what makes folks check out, and it’s happening everywhere right now. And…nobody is doing a good job of addressing it, and it’s costing companies.

Pushing harder doesn’t shrink the lag. The people side of what we do was never ready for the speed of the technology we already had five years ago, and it’s no more ready today, because we haven’t changed anything.

That’s the honest answer to why AI isn’t making companies faster.

What leaders actually control

A large part of this has nothing to do with the teams. It’s the voice of the leader.

The answer is not making things sound more urgent. Pressing harder won’t help.

Communicating what’s being built, why it’s being built, and who it’s for directly to the crews responsible for doing it, rather than from a board deck or a shareholder report. Creating a better tolerance for small failures, and giving people the tools to minize risk…that’s how teams can claim the autonomy, the authority and the courage to move.

Speed comes from putting the important things at the top of the pile and letting th