Why is enterprise slow to adopt AI? 

The real reason enterprise AI adoption is moving at the speed of a dial-up modem isn’t a lack of GPUs – it’s a hilarious, if tragic, comedy of misaligned incentives.

While CEOs shout “AI first!” from the rooftops of the company’s headquarters, the vision usually dies a slow death in the middle management layer. Here, VPs have perfected the art of “productive stagnation,” burying actual progress under a mountain of committees, steer-cos, and roadmaps. It turns out that if you can fill a 40-hour week with meetings about how to implement AI, you never actually have to risk the terrifying possibility of it working and making your calendar look suspiciously empty.

Remember the human law of change. It happened in each one of the tech evolution moments of our time. First, 1. resistance, 2. acceptance, 3. adoption, 4. implementation, 5. normalizing.  The larger the human system (Community) is, the slower it is to normalize it. 

Meanwhile, on the front lines, the survival instinct of the resistance movement has kicked in with full “James Bond” energy. Since the reward for higher efficiency is usually just a larger pile of work (or a pink slip), employees are treating AI like a secret agent. They use it in the shadows to finish a day’s work in an hour, then carefully spend the remaining seven hours looking “busy” to avoid the scrutiny of a legacy system that doesn’t know how to reward anything but time spent at a desk.

This corporate stalemate persists because we’re asking staff to be the architects of their own obsolescence for zero extra pay. I am actively looking to invest in companies that are building the tools to fix this broken reward system and bridge the incentive gap. Real transformation will finally happen – not when the tech is better, but when the incentives finally make sense for the people actually doing the work.