Remember the People Using It
Most organizations bought AI like a light switch. Flip it on. Watch the costs drop. Redeploy the savings. The board approved it. The CFO modeled it. The CEO announced it.
Then reality arrived.
Peter Bradbury, a Chief Commercial Officer with advisory experience across dozens of organizations, describes a pattern playing out across industries right now: companies that moved aggressively on AI cost targets are coming clean. The savings did not materialize on the timeline promised. Some laid off too many people before the technology was ready to fill the gap. Others signed up for capabilities they did not fully understand and are only now working out what they actually bought.
The technology was not the problem. The assumption that technology adoption is automatic was.
Colin McQuay, Senior Director and Head of SRM at Nestle, sees the same dynamic from inside a large CPG organization. Individual AI tools get adopted when people see what they can do. Scanning competitor earnings, summarizing a meeting, drafting a brief. Those habits form quickly once someone has a reason to try. The harder challenge is building agentic workflows that actually change how a team operates day to day. That requires behavior change at scale, and behavior change does not happen because a platform was purchased.
What McQuay has seen work: consistent internal communication about real successes, making the value visible at every level, and creating enough FOMO that people come looking for access rather than waiting to be trained. De-mystification as a leadership discipline, not a one-time launch event.
Bradbury frames it historically. Every major technology disruption, from the internet to the industrial revolution, ultimately created more skilled work rather than less. AI will do the same. But only for organizations that invest in moving their people up the skill curve rather than assuming the technology will do it for them.
The companies pulling ahead are not the ones with the best models. They are the ones whose people actually show up every day and use them.