What CEOs Get Wrong About "AI-Augmented" Teams

Every week I hear some version of the same conversation.

A CEO has decided the company is going “AI-first.” They’ve purchased a suite of tools. They’ve announced it in an all-hands. They’re expecting efficiency gains within the quarter.

Six months later, they’re frustrated. Adoption is patchy. Half the team is using the tools, half isn’t. The efficiency gains haven’t materialized. And somewhere in a Slack channel nobody checks, there are three different AI workflows doing three versions of the same thing, none of them talking to each other.

This is not an AI problem. It’s an operational design problem. And it stems from a handful of mistakes I see CEOs make almost every time.