AI Transformation Is Failing to Deliver Profitable Growth—and It’s a Leadership Problem

The view is clear. The decisions are not. Most leaders can see AI coming, but few know how to lead through it.

Industries are redefined in real time. New leaders are emerging from nowhere. Laggards are becoming leaders. And the comfort of past success offers zero protection against the AI zunami now hitting every sector.

What surprises me is not that AI is moving fast. It’s that most leadership teams still treat it like a side quest.

They run pilots. They buy tools. They appoint task forces. They talk about “strategy” and "AI everywhere." Then nothing really changes. It's a theater to control the perception of "doing something".

The consequence: AI is now everywhere, but growth or profit are not.

The data tells the story. In several of the latest global surveys, 88% of enterprises say their organizations use AI at least in one function, yet meaningful, top and bottom-line impact is reported missing. And the AI adoption outlook is equally blunt—at least 30% of genAI projects are abandoned after proof-of-concept, because the AI is not enterprise-wide, and the business value never becomes real at scale.

And that’s the problem. That's when new competition is taking your place.

Most leaders don’t fully understand the power of enterprise-wide AI—not because they’re uninformed, but because they’re using yesterday’s mental leadership models to navigate a new terrain. They struggle with enterprise AI because they view it as just tech, not a systemic shift in business strategy. In most cases, small projects on the edge of the business lead to failed pilots due to poor strategy considerations, data issues, and insufficient governance, resulting in stalled adoption, legal implications, and wasted investment.

It’s the definition of failure—and leaders don’t know what to do about it.

Enterprise-wide AI is not “sprinkling AI” into a few support functions or adding a chatbot to customer service. It’s what happens when intelligence moves into the core of the business: into the product, the customer experience, the commercial engine, and the systems that run the enterprise—CRM, ERP, data platforms, and the supply chain workflows where value is actually created and captured.

When that shift happens, AI stops being an experiment and starts becoming how the company competes. You automate what never should have required human attention. You augment the decisions that drive performance—not just the dashboards that describe it. You adapt services, pricing, and execution in near real time. Consistently, across the enterprise, not in isolated pockets.

That’s the bar. And it’s not what I see in most companies right now.

Here’s what I see in boardrooms and executive teams.

The first pattern: AI is recognized as “important,” but it is not anchored in the company’s economic logic. Leaders can’t answer the questions that matter: Where does AI change the business model? Where does it reshape margin structure and profitable growth? Where does it create real differentiation? Where does it compress cycle time so you can out-sprint the market? Where does it create new demand?

Without those answers, AI becomes a collection of pilots—interesting, expensive, and strategically irrelevant.

Then comes the second pattern: leaders stall. They over-study. They wait for certainty. They ask for more benchmarks and more proof. That feels responsible. It is not. It is a delay disguised as rigor. The decisiveness is killing your growth and momentum. Meanwhile, faster competitors are learning in public, shipping, iterating, and resetting customer expectations.

The third pattern is the quiet killer: even when pilots work, they don’t scale. They stay trapped in silos. They never become part of the enterprise's operating rhythm or core business. There is no shared architecture, no clear ownership, no talent plan, and no governance. AI becomes “innovation,” which is another way of saying “optional.” Never hitting a P&L for impact.

The patterns of leadership AI blindspots are why I keep saying the same thing: AI is not an IT project. It is the CEO and Board's responsibility. If leadership doesn’t own it, it won’t compound. It will fragment.

It's not a technology issue. It's leadership not keeping up with reality.

Here is the deeper issue and the brutal truth. Leaders are trying to use AI to optimize for a world that no longer exists. The world they know. What was instead of what will be. Leading to the worst failure: irrelevance. Nothing good happens when your customer no longer cares about you. Past glory is not going to save you. Just see what happened to Kodak and Nokia with that approach.

The traditional management theories and strategy frameworks were built for a past time when change was slower than planning cycles. In the AI economy, reality updates faster than your annual strategy deck. If your decision-making system cannot sense change early, choose decisively, and adapt quickly, then you don’t have a winning strategy. You have a story about the past.

Instead, you need strategic fitness to win the fight. Strategic fitness is not efficiency. It is adaptability with direction. It is the ability to make intelligent selections—what to double down on, what to stop, what to rebuild, and what to re-invent—before the market forces those choices on you.

AI-laggers tend to lose the same things in the same order. First, they lose speed. Then they lose customer relevance. Then they lose talent. Then the capital gets more expensive. And by the time they “take AI seriously,” they are playing catch-up in a market that has already moved on.

That's why I built an Enterprise 90-day AI transformation program

I’ve been in the board and executive rooms where that truth was inconvenient, where courage was optional, and where hesitance killed momentum and eventually the company.

I started calling out the value-threatening issues and developed a playbook of what I have seen work as a solution. Suggesting a new path forward to become strategically fit for the fight in an AI-driven age of intelligence. It’s not only theory. It is the culmination of lived strategy experiences across the globe. It’s the essence of what happens when you stop following the script and start leading for real.

Because most companies don’t need more sporadic AI, they need a decisive operating model and decision leadership to move from AI talk to enterprise-wide action—fast enough to matter and concrete enough to execute.

I have one goal: to make sure your company becomes more strategically fit for the Age of Intelligence—before the market makes the strategic decisions for you.

The AI transformation program is not a long, drawn-out transformation theater. It is a time-bounded strategic fitness upgrade. In 90 days, we create clarity on what AI means for your business model and your competitive advantage. We make the hard calls about where AI belongs in the core of the enterprise, not at the edges.

We align leadership around a few high-impact moves that can actually be implemented and monetized. And we put in place the minimum operating system—data, architecture, governance, and decision cadence—so AI doesn’t outpace trust, compliance, and accountability.

The objective is simple: create sustainable economic value by turning AI into repeatable execution. Not scattered experiments. Not innovation theatre. Not another set of slides.

If you’re a CEO or Board that knows the terrain has shifted—and you’re tired of pilots that never scale—this program is a structured framework designed to help you cross the gap from awareness to enterprise-wide advantage.

Because in the Age of Intelligence, the winners are not the companies with the most AI. They are the companies that become strategically fit enough to use intelligence as a competitive force.

Reinvent or Expire.

Connect Now