企业正在信息不完整的情况下推进人工智能转型。在与多个行业的组织进行广泛交流后,我认为有四个关键事实能够解释人工智能应用的真实状况:
人工智能能提升工作绩效。我们如何得知?首先,员工们确实这么认为。一项针对丹麦知识工作者的代表性研究发现,用户认为人工智能将其工作中41%的任务耗时缩短了一半;而近期一项针对美国人的调查则显示,员工表示使用人工智能使他们的生产力提高了两倍(将90分钟的任务缩短至30分钟)。自我报告虽非完全精确,但我们还有来自对照实验的其他数据,这些数据表明,在产品开发、销售、咨询领域,以及程序员、法学院学生和呼叫中心员工中,均存在效率提升。
相当高比例的人群在工作中使用人工智能。一年前的那项丹麦研究发现,65%的市场营销人员、64%的记者和30%的律师等群体曾在工作中使用人工智能。针对美国员工的研究显示,2024年12月有超过30%的人在工作中使用过人工智能,而这一数字在2025年4月增长至40%。当然,在ChatGPT已是全球访问量第四大网站的背景下,这些数字可能仍属低估。
当前人工智能系统所能带来的变革性收益,远超大多数人的认知。深度研究报告能在几分钟内完成原本需要数小时的分析工作(许多研究人员告诉我,核查这些报告远比撰写它们要快);能够处理实际工作的智能体正开始涌现;日益智能的系统能够产出真正高质量的成果。
这些收益并未被企业充分获取。迄今为止,企业通常报告从人工智能中获得的收益较小或中等,且截至2024年底,人工智能对工资或工作时长尚未产生重大影响。
如何将前三点与最后一点协调起来?答案是:提升个人绩效的 AI 使用,并不会自然而然地转化为组织绩效的提升。要获得组织层面的收益,就需要组织创新,重新思考激励机制、流程,甚至工作的本质。但公司内部的组织创新能力已经萎缩。几十年来,企业一直将这项工作外包给咨询公司或企业软件供应商,他们开发出能同时解决多家公司问题的通用方案。这种做法在这里行不通,至少短期内不行。没有人掌握关于如何在贵公司最佳使用 AI 的特殊信息,也没有现成的手册告诉你如何将其整合到组织中。即便是大型 AI 公司,在发布模型时也不知道它们的最佳用途。他们尤其不了解你的行业、组织或具体情境。
我们都在共同摸索。因此,如果你想获得优势,就必须比其他人更快地找到答案。要做到这一点,你需要借助领导力、实验室和群众的力量——这是 AI 转型的三个关键。
领导力
归根结底,AI 首先是一个领导力问题,领导者需要认识到 AI 带来了紧迫的挑战和机遇。自从我几个月前撰写这个话题以来,一个重大变化是,越来越多的领导者开始意识到应对 AI 的必要性。你可以从两份广为流传的内部备忘录中看到这一点,分别来自 Shopify 的 CEO 和 Duolingo 的 CEO,他们都确立了 AI 对公司未来的重要性。
但仅有紧迫感是不够的。这些信息很好地传达了“为何是现在”,却未能描绘出那幅关键而生动的图景:对于你的组织而言,由人工智能驱动的未来究竟会是什么样子、带来怎样的感受?我的同事安德鲁·卡顿(Andrew Carton)的研究表明,员工并不会因为领导层关于绩效提升或利润底线的声明而受到激励去改变,他们想要的是关于未来实际样貌的清晰而生动的画面:未来的工作会是什么样?效率提升会转化为裁员,还是会被用来发展组织?员工将因如何使用人工智能而获得奖励(或惩罚)?你不必确切知道答案,但你应该有一个正在努力实现、并且愿意分享的目标。员工们正在等待指引,而指引的性质将影响“大众”如何采纳和使用人工智能。
然而,仅有总体愿景是不够的,因为领导者需要开始预见在人工智能的世界里工作将如何改变。虽然人工智能目前还不能取代大多数人类的工作岗位,但它确实取代了这些工作中的特定任务。我与许多法律专业人士交谈过,他们认为当前深度研究工具的状态足以处理部分曾经昂贵的调研任务。氛围编程改变了程序员分配时间和精力的方式。而随着人工智能视频的快速进步,很难看不到营销和媒体工作正在发生的变化。例如,谷歌新的 Veo 3 根据文本提示词生成了这段短视频片段,包括声音:一则关于“芝士水獭”(Cheesey Otters)的广告,这是一种用水獭形状饼干制成的新零食。广告中,一个孩子正在吃它们,母亲举起包装袋说“水獭棒极了”(otterly great)。
然而,制作短视频片段、更快地编写代码或按需获取研究资料的能力,并不等同于绩效提升。要实现这一点,需要决策层与实验室协同合作,共同构建并测试融合人工智能与人类的新工作流程。这也意味着要从根本上重新思考你执行特定任务的原因。过去,企业为一篇研究报告要支付数万美元,如今它们可以免费生成数百份这样的报告。这能让你的分析师和管理人员做些什么?如果数百份报告并无用处,那么研究报告的意义又在哪里?
我越来越多地看到,一些组织开始尝试用全新的激进工作方式来应对人工智能。例如,将软件工程团队分散开来,不再将其置于中央IT部门之下,而是让他们与领域专家和营销专家组成跨职能团队。这些团队可以共同进行“氛围协作”,在数天内独立完成过去需要跨部门协调数月才能完成的项目。而这只是未来工作的一种可能。领导者需要描绘他们想要的未来,但他们也不必独自想出所有创新点子。相反,他们可以求助于“大众”和“实验室”。
大众
创新和绩效提升都发生在“大众”之中,即那些摸索如何使用人工智能来帮助自己完成工作的员工。由于人工智能没有使用手册(说真的,每个人都在共同摸索),学会善用人工智能是一个发现的过程,这对经验丰富的员工尤其有利。对自己的工作有深刻理解的人,可以通过反复试错轻松判断人工智能何时对他们的工作有用,这是局外人(甚至精通人工智能的初级员工)无法做到的。经验丰富的人工智能用户随后可以分享他们的工作流程和人工智能使用方式,从而惠及所有人。
受这一愿景的吸引,企业(包括那些高度监管行业的企业)越来越多地让员工直接使用 AI 聊天机器人,并提供一些基础培训,期望看到“群体”实现创新。但大多数企业都遇到了同样的问题:官方 AI 聊天机器人的使用率最高只达到员工总数的 20% 左右,且报告的生产力提升幅度很小。然而,超过 40% 的员工承认在工作中使用 AI,并且他们私下报告了显著的绩效提升。这种差异指向了两个关键动态:许多员工在隐藏自己的 AI 使用行为(通常有充分理由),而另一些员工尽管接受了初步培训,却仍然不确定如何将 AI 有效应用到自己的任务中。

这些问题可以通过领导力和实验室来解决。
解决隐藏 AI 使用行为(我称之为“秘密赛博格”)的问题是一个领导力问题。考虑一下普通员工的动机。他们可能听过一场关于不当使用 AI 可能受到惩罚的吓人谈话,因此不想冒任何风险。或者,他们可能因为借助 AI 产出了令人难以置信的成果而在工作中被视为英雄,但他们怀疑如果告诉别人这是 AI 的功劳,管理者就不会再尊重他们。又或者,他们知道企业将生产力提升视为削减成本的机会,并担心如果公司意识到 AI 能完成他们部分工作,自己(或同事)会被解雇。再或者,他们怀疑即使公开 AI 使用行为不会受到惩罚,也不会得到奖励。又或者,他们知道即使企业不削减成本也不奖励他们的使用,任何生产力提升只会变成一种期望,即需要完成更多工作。员工不公开使用 AI 的理由,远比公开使用的理由要多。
领导力可以发挥作用。与其进行关于人工智能伦理的空泛讨论或制定令人恐慌的一刀切政策,不如明确划定允许进行任何形式实验的领域,并倾向于在道德和法律允许的前提下,让人们使用人工智能。领导者还应将培训视为一个机会,不是用来学习提示词技巧(这些技巧虽然有用,但随着模型理解意图的能力越来越强,其重要性正在下降),而是让人们获得人工智能的实践经验,并练习向人工智能传达自己的需求。当然,你还需要想办法让员工放心,让他们知道公开自己因使用AI而提高的生产效率不会导致裁员,因为在发生巨大变革的时期,利用技术成果来解雇员工通常是个坏主意。要为那些发现人工智能变革性应用机会的员工建立激励机制,甚至是重奖(我见过有公司提供度假、晋升和巨额现金奖励)。领导者也可以以身作则,在每次会议中积极使用人工智能,并谈论它如何帮助自己。
即使有了正确的愿景和激励措施,仍然会有相当一部分员工不倾向于探索人工智能,只想要明确的应用案例和产品。这就是实验室发挥作用的地方。
实验室
尽管分散式创新很重要,但集中式的努力在弄清楚如何在组织中使用人工智能方面也扮演着角色。与许多研究机构不同,实验室是双元性的,既进行面向未来的探索(在人工智能领域,未来可能只是几个月后),也进行成果转化,持续推出新产品和新方法。因此,实验室需要由领域专家以及技术人员和非技术人员混合组成。幸运的是,人群提供了研究人员,因为那些热衷于使用人工智能并自豪地与公司分享的爱好者,往往是实验室的完美成员。他们的工作将完全或大部分围绕人工智能展开。你需要他们专注于构建,而不是分析或抽象的战略。以下是他们将构建的内容:
从大众中收集提示词和解决方案,并快速广泛地分发。大众会发现可以转化为即时机遇的用例和问题。组建跨职能团队,围绕简单的提示词和智能体,快速构建粗糙的产品。进行迭代和测试。然后将它们发布到你的组织中,并衡量效果。持续这样做。
为你的组织构建 AI 基准测试。几乎所有官方的 AI 基准测试都存在缺陷,或者侧重于琐事、数学或编程测试。这些测试无法告诉你哪个 AI 写作能力最强,哪个最能分析财务模型,或者哪个能最好地引导客户购物。你需要开发自己的基准测试:每个模型在你公司内部实际执行的任务上表现如何?差距缩小的速度有多快?领导层应提供一些指导,但最终需要由实验室来决定衡量什么以及如何衡量。一些基准测试可以是客观的(Anthropic 有一份基准测试指南,可以作为起点),但对于一些复杂的基准测试,基于经验进行“纯感觉评估”也是可以的。
例如,我通过给 Manus(一个基于 Claude 的 AI 智能体)一项艰巨的任务并评估其结果,来“凭感觉评估”它分析新初创公司的能力。我给了它一个虚构初创公司的简短描述,以及一个 Excel 文件中一套详细的预测财务数据。这些材料来自我们在沃顿商学院构建的一个复杂商业模拟(从未在线分享过),学生团队需要花费数十小时才能完成。我很好奇 AI 是否能弄明白。作为指导,我给了它一份需要分析的商业模式要素清单,仅此而已。
仅用了几条提示词,Manus 就生成了一个网站、一份 PowerPoint 演示文稿、一份商业模式分析,以及基于市场研究的财务假设测试。你可以在这里看到它的实际运行效果。在我对这份工作的评估中,那份 45 页的商业模式分析非常扎实。它并非完全没有错误,但错误远比我想象中优秀学生能做出的成果要少得多,而且内容也详尽得多。我还得到了一个初稿网站、所需的 PowerPoint 文件,以及一份对财务假设的深度分析。浏览这些内容帮助我发现了薄弱环节——图像生成能力、在未询问我的情况下就倾向于直接推断答案——以及优势所在。现在,每当有新的智能体系统问世,我都可以拿它和 Manus 进行比较,看看发展趋势。
超越基准测试,去构建那些……目前还无法正常工作的东西。如果你用 AI 智能体来完成关键业务流程中的所有工作,那会是什么样子?把它构建出来,看看它在哪些地方会失败。然后,当新模型发布时,把它接入你构建的系统,看看它是否有所改进。如果进步的速度持续下去,这将让你有机会抢先一窥未来的发展方向,并在 AI 模型突破关键门槛的那一刻,真正拥有一个可部署的原型。
构建“挑衅性”的演示。许多人还没有真正接触过 AI 的潜力。那些能震撼人们、让他们理解 AI 如何能改变你的组织、甚至让他们感到些许不安的演示和切身感受的体验,在激发好奇心和克服惰性方面具有巨大价值。展示那些今天看似不可能,但明天可能变得稀松平常的事物。
重新审视组织架构
事实上,即便是这个框架也可能不够。我们的组织,从结构到流程再到目标,都是围绕人类智能构建的,因为那是我们当时唯一拥有的东西。人工智能改变了这一基本事实——我们现在可以按需获取某种形式的智能,这要求我们更深入地思考工作的本质。当曾经需要数周的研究如今只需几分钟就能完成时,瓶颈不再是研究本身,而是弄清楚该做什么研究。当代码可以快速编写时,限制不再是编程速度,而是理解该构建什么。当内容可以即时生成时,约束不再是生产,而是知道什么才能真正对人们有意义。
而且变化的步伐并未放缓。每隔几个月(几周?几天?),我们就会看到新的能力,迫使我们重新思考什么是可能的。这些模型在复杂推理、处理数据、理解上下文方面正变得更好。它们开始能够自主规划和行动。每一项进步都意味着组织需要更快地适应、更多地实验,并对人工智能对其未来的意义进行更宏大的思考。挑战与其说是实施人工智能,不如说是转变工作完成的方式。而这种转变需要在技术本身不断演进的同时发生。
关键在于将人工智能的采用视为一个组织学习挑战,而不仅仅是技术挑战。成功的公司正在领导层、实验室和大众之间建立反馈循环,使它们能够比竞争对手学得更快。它们正在重新思考关于工作如何完成的基本假设。而且,关键的是,它们没有外包或忽视这一挑战。
开始行动的时机不是在一切变得清晰之时——而是现在,当一切仍然混乱和不确定的时候。优势属于那些愿意学得最快的人。
在我与企业交流时,法务部门往往成为决定 AI 成败的关键瓶颈。许多公司仍以过时的隐私理由禁止使用 AI(目前没有任何主流模型会利用企业或 API 数据进行训练,而且完全可以获得完全符合 HIPAA 等法规要求的版本)。虽然没有任何云软件是零风险的,但不作为同样存在风险:影子 AI 的使用几乎无处不在,当公司不允许使用 AI 时,所有的实验和学习都只能秘密进行。幸运的是,有很多榜样可以效仿,包括那些在高度监管行业中、正在将 AI 应用于公司所有职能部门的企业。
Companies are approaching AI transformation with incomplete information. After extensive conversations with organizations across industries, I think four key facts explain what's really happening with AI adoption:
AI boosts work performance. How do we know? For one thing, workers certainly think it does. A representative study of knowledge workers in Denmark found that users thought that AI halved their working time for 41% of the tasks they do at work, and a more recent survey of Americans found that workers said using AI tripled their productivity (reducing 90-minute tasks to 30 minutes). Self-reporting is never completely accurate, but we have other data from controlled experiments that suggest gains among product development, sales, and consulting, as well as for coders, law students, and call center workers.
A large percentage of people are using AI at work. That Danish study from a year ago found that 65% of marketers, 64% of journalists, and 30% of lawyers, among others, had used AI at work. The study of American workers found over 30% had used AI at work in December, 2024, a number which grew to 40% in April, 2025. And, of course, this may be an undercount in a world where ChatGPT is the fourth most visited website on the planet.
There are more transformational gains available with today’s AI systems than most currently realize. Deep research reports do many hours of analytical work in a few minutes (and I have been told by many researchers that checking these reports is much faster than writing them); agents are just starting to appear that can do real work; and increasingly smart systems can produce really high-quality outcomes.
These gains are not being captured by companies. Companies are typically reporting small to moderate gains from AI so far, and there is no major impact on wages or hours worked as of the end of 2024.
How do we reconcile the first three points with the final one? The answer is that AI use that boosts individual performance does not naturally translate to improving organizational performance. To get organizational gains requires organizational innovation, rethinking incentives, processes, and even the nature of work. But the muscles for organizational innovation inside companies have atrophied. For decades, companies have outsourced this to consultants or enterprise software vendors who develop generalized approaches that address the issues of many companies at once. That won’t work here, at least for a while. Nobody has special information about how to best use AI at your company, or a playbook for how to integrate it into your organization. Even the major AI companies release models without knowing how they can be best used. They especially don’t know your industry, organization, or context.
We are all figuring this out together. So, if you want to gain an advantage, you are going to have to figure it out faster than everyone else. And to do that, you will need to harness the efforts of Leadership, Lab, and Crowd - the three keys to AI transformation.
Leadership
Ultimately, AI starts as a leadership problem, where leaders recognize that AI presents urgent challenges and opportunities. One big change since I wrote about this topic months ago is that more leaders are starting to recognize the need to address AI. You can see this in two viral memos, from the CEO of Shopify and the CEO of Duolingo, establishing the importance of AI to their company’s future.
But urgency alone isn't enough. These messages do a good job signaling the 'why now' but stop short of painting that crucial, vivid picture: what does the AI-powered future actually look and feel like for your organization? My colleague Andrew Carton has shown that workers are not motivated to change by leadership statements about performance gains or bottom lines, they want clear and vivid images of what the future actually looks like: What will work be like in the future? Will efficiency gains be translated into layoffs or will they be used to grow the organization? How will workers be rewarded (or punished) for how they use AI? You don’t have to know the answer with certainty, but you should have a goal that you are working towards that you are willing to share. Workers are waiting for guidance, and the nature of that guidance will impact how The Crowd adopts and uses AI.
An overall vision is not enough, however, because leaders need to start to anticipate how work will change in a world of AI. While AI is not currently a replacement for most human jobs, it does replace specific tasks within those jobs. I have spoken to numerous legal professionals who see the current state of Deep Research tools as good enough to handle portions of once-expensive research tasks. Vibe coding changes how programmers allocate time and effort. And it is hard to not see changes to marketing and media work in the rapid gains in AI video. For example, Google’s new Veo 3 created this short video snippet, sound and all, from the text prompt: An advertisement for Cheesey Otters, a new snack made out of otter shaped crackers. The commercial shows a kid eating them, and the mom holds up the package and says "otterly great"
Yet the ability to make a short video clip, or code faster, or get research on demand, does not equal performance gains. To do that will require decisions about where Leadership and The Lab should work together to build and test new workflows that integrate AIs and humans. It also means fundamentally rethinking why you are doing particular tasks. Companies used to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a single research report, now they can generate hundreds of those for free. What does that allow your analysts and managers to do? If hundreds of reports aren’t useful, then what was the point of research reports?
I am increasingly seeing organizations start to experiment with radical new approaches to work in response to AI. For example, dispersing software engineering teams, removing them from a central IT function and instead having them work in cross-functional teams with subject matter experts and marketing experts. Together, these groups can “vibework” and independently build projects in days that would have taken months of coordination across departments. And this is just one possible future for work. Leaders need to describe the future they want, but they also don’t have to generate every idea for innovation on their own. Instead, they can turn to The Crowd and The Lab.
The Crowd
Both innovation and performance improvements happen in The Crowd, the employees who figure out how to use AI to help get their own work done. As there is no instruction manual for AI (seriously, everyone is figuring this out together), learning to use AI well is a process of discovery that benefits experienced workers. People with a strong understanding of their job can easily assess when an AI is useful for their work through trial and error, in the way that outsiders (and even AI-savvy junior workers) cannot. Experienced AI users can then share their workflows and AI use in ways that benefit everyone.
Enticed by this vision, companies (including those in highly regulated industries1) have increasingly been giving employees direct access to AI chatbots, and some basic training, in hopes of seeing The Crowd innovate. Most run into the same problem, finding that the use of official AI chatbots maxes out at 20% or so of workers, and that reported productivity gains are small. Yet over 40% of workers admit using AI at work, and they are privately reporting large performance gains. This discrepancy points to two critical dynamics: many workers are hiding their AI use, often for good reason, while others remain unsure how to effectively apply AI to their tasks, despite initial training.

These are problems that can be solved by Leadership and the Lab.
Solving the problem of hidden AI use (what I call “Secret Cyborgs”) is a Leadership problem. Consider the incentives of the average worker. They may have received a scary talk about how improper AI use might be punished, and they don’t want to take any risks. Or maybe they are being treated as heroes at work for their incredible AI-assisted outputs, but they suspect if they tell anyone it is AI, managers will stop respecting them. Or maybe they know that companies see productivity gains as an opportunity for cost cutting and suspect that they (or their colleagues) will be fired if the company realizes that AI does some of their job. Or maybe they suspect that if they reveal their AI use, even if they aren’t punished, they won’t be rewarded. Or maybe they know that even if companies don’t cut costs and reward their use, any productivity gains will just become an expectation that more work will get done. There are more reasons for workers to not use AI publicly than to use it.
Leadership can help. Instead of vague talks on AI ethics or terrifying blanket policies, provide clear areas where experimentation of any kind is permitted and be biased towards allowing people to use AI where it is ethically and legally possible. Leaders also should consider training less an opportunity to learn prompting techniques (which are valuable but getting less important as models get better at figuring out intent), but as a chance to give people hands-on AI experience and practice communicating their needs to AI. And, of course, you will need to figure out how you will reassure your workers that revealing their productivity gains will not lead to layoffs, because it is often a bad idea to use technological gains to fire workers at a moment of massive change. Build incentives, even massive incentives (I have seen companies offer vacations, promotions, and large cash rewards), for employees who discover transformational opportunities for AI use. Leaders can also model use themselves, actively using AI at every meeting and talking about how it helps them.
Even with proper vision and incentives, there will still be a substantial number of workers who aren’t inclined to explore AI and just want clear use cases and products. That is where The Lab comes in.
The Lab
As important as decentralized innovation is, there is also a role for a more centralized effort to figure out how to use AI in your organization. Unlike a lot of research organizations, The Lab is ambidextrous, engaging in both exploration for the future (which in AI may just be months away) and exploitation, releasing a steady stream of new products and methods. Thus, The Lab needs to consist of subject matter experts and a mix of technologists and non-technologists. Fortunately, the Crowd provides the researchers, as those enthusiasts who figure out how to use AI and proudly share it with the company are often perfect members of The Lab. Their job will be completely, or mostly, about AI. You need them to focus on building, not analysis or abstract strategy. Here is what they will build:
Take prompts and solutions from The Crowd and distribute them widely, very quickly. The Crowd will discover use cases and problems that can be turned into immediate opportunities. Build fast and dirty products with cross-functional teams, centered around simple prompts and agents. Iterate and test them. Then release them into your organization and measure what happens. Keep doing this.
Build AI benchmarks for your organization. Almost all the official benchmarks for AI are flawed, or focus on tests of trivia, math or coding. These don’t tell you which AI does the best writing or can best analyze a financial model or can help guide a customer making purchases. You need to develop your own benchmarks: how good are each of the models at the tasks you actually do inside of your company? How fast is the gap closing? Leadership should help provide some guidance, but ultimately The Lab will need to decide what to measure and how. Some benchmarks will be objective (Anthropic has a guide to benchmarking that can help as a starting place), but it is also fine for some complex benchmarks to be “vibes alone,” based on experience.
For example, I “vibe benchmarked” Manus, an AI agent based on Claude, on its ability to analyze new startups by giving it a hard assignment and evaluating the results. I gave it a short description of a fictional startup and a detailed set of projected financials in an Excel file. These materials came from a complex business simulation we built at Wharton (and never shared online) that took teams of students dozens of hours to complete. I was curious if the AI could figure it out. As guidance, I gave it a checklist of business model elements to analyze, and nothing else.
In just a couple of prompts, Manus developed a website, a PowerPoint pitch deck, an analysis of the business model, and a test of the financial assumptions based on market research. You can see it at work here. In my evaluations of the work, the 45 page business model analysis was very solid. It was not completely free from mistakes, but has far less mistakes, and is far more thorough, than what I would expect from talented students. I also got an initial draft website, the requested PowerPoint, and a Deep Dive in financial assumptions. Looking through these helped me find weak spots — image generation, a tendency to extrapolate answers without asking me — and strong ones. Now, every time a new agentic system comes out, I can compare it to Manus and see where things are heading.
Go beyond benchmarks to build stuff that doesn’t work… yet. What would it look like if you used AI agents to do all the work for key business processes? Build it and see where it fails. Then, when a new model comes out, plug it into what you built and see if it is any better. If the rate of advancement continues, this gives you the opportunity to get a first glance at where things are heading, and to actually have a deployable prototype at the first moment AI models improve past critical thresholds.
Build provocations. Many people haven't truly engaged with AI's potential. Demos and visceral experiences that jolt people into understanding how AI could transform your organization, or even make them a little uncomfortable, have immense value in sparking curiosity and overcoming inertia. Show what seems impossible today but might be commonplace tomorrow.
Re-examining the organization
The truth is that even this framework might not be enough. Our organizations, from their structures to their processes to their goals, were all built around human intelligence because that's all we had. AI alters this fundamental fact, we can now get intelligence, of a sort, on demand, which requires us to think more deeply about the nature of work. When research that once took weeks now takes minutes, the bottleneck isn't the research anymore, it's figuring out what research to do. When code can be written quickly, the limitation isn't programming speed, it's understanding what to build. When content can be generated instantly, the constraint isn't production, it's knowing what will actually matter to people.
And the pace of change isn't slowing. Every few months (weeks? days?) we see new capabilities that force us to rethink what's possible. The models are getting better at complex reasoning, at working with data, at understanding context. They're starting to be able to plan and act on their own. Each advance means organizations need to adapt faster, experiment more, and think bigger about what AI means for their future. The challenge isn't implementing AI as much as it is transforming how work gets done. And that transformation needs to happen while the technology itself keeps evolving.
The key is treating AI adoption as an organizational learning challenge, not merely a technical one. Successful companies are building feedback loops between Leadership, Lab, and Crowd that let them learn faster than their competitors. They are rethinking fundamental assumptions about how work gets done. And, critically, they're not outsourcing or ignoring this challenge.
The time to begin isn't when everything becomes clear - it's now, while everything is still messy and uncertain. The advantage goes to those willing to learn fastest.
When I talk to companies, the General Counsel's office is often the choke point that determines AI success. Many firms still ban AI use for outdated privacy reasons (no major model trains on enterprise or API data, and you can get fully HIPAA etc. compliant versions). While no cloud software is without risk, there are risks in not acting: shadow AI use is nearly universal, and all of the experimentation and learning is kept secret when the company doesn’t allow AI use. Fortunately, there are lots of role models to follow, including companies in heavily regulated industries that are adopting AI across all functions of their firm.