Most AI programs I watch in the region are still shaped as vendor selection. Pick Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise, sign the MSA, push licenses through IT, send the welcome email. Three months later the measure of success is still seat activation. Seats logged in, queries run, maybe a screenshot of someone saving time on a report, maybe a quarterly engagement curve from the vendor.
Seat activation measures the procurement rather than the work.
Walk through the company six months in and the symptom is clearer than any dashboard. The Monday CFO pack is still being built by the same analyst, in the same workflow, pulling the same numbers from the same systems. Copilot is open in a second tab, but the pack is still being assembled by hand. The pack didn’t change, even though the tool is live and in use.
In the places where AI is actually changing how work gets done, the shape looks different. Someone with operating authority has rewritten how a recurring output gets produced. The Monday pack the CEO reads is now built through a different workflow, with a model in the middle of it rather than only at the edge, and the weekly commercial review starts from a different document than it did last quarter. The change is in the work, not in the roster.
That kind of change doesn’t come from IT. IT can buy the tool and grant the license. It can’t rewrite the workflow, because the workflow belongs to an operator with a P&L. And the operator usually doesn’t rewrite it unless someone senior insists on the change long enough for the old shape to be retired.
I see this most clearly in family group structures where AI sits with a digital transformation office or an IT function that reports up through infrastructure. The office has a mandate to ‘drive AI adoption’ and no authority to rewrite a business unit’s operating rhythm. The business unit head has the authority and no mandate. So the tools sit there, lightly used, until the next budget review asks why the spend happened.
Stop framing AI programs as IT projects. Fund them as operating projects and assign an operator who owns the workflow rewrite. The tool is the easiest part of the program, and it’s the part that gets most of the attention.