The AI Freeze: When Leadership Cannot Agree on What AI Is For

Your organization may not have an AI strategy problem. 

It may have an executive alignment problem. 

Speaking with a colleague recently, the AI tension inside his organization was clear. 

Different executives were looking at AI through very different lenses. 

The CEO wants to become an “AI-first” company. At the same time, there is concern that AI could eventually allow customers to do some of what the company's products and services do today. 

The CFO sees AI as a cost-cutting opportunity: 

AI = more work done with fewer people at a lower cost. 

The CIO is looking for a strategy for how AI can create more value. 

The COO is looking at how AI can make operations more efficient, make people more effective, and hopefully improve their well-being. 

Different lenses. Different priorities. Different ideas about what AI is supposed to accomplish. 

And none of them is necessarily wrong. 

The problem is what happens when an executive team cannot decide how those objectives fit together: 

The AI Freeze 

The tension around “What should AI be used for?” can lead executives to freeze. 

They keep discussing. They look for more information. Different departments experiment. Everyone waits for greater certainty or the perfect answer. 

Meanwhile, the organization is not actually standing still. 

Employees are experimenting with AI on their own, sometimes creating information security risks. 

Departments run disconnected experiments, hoping to gather enough data to help executives decide what to do. 

Resources are spent on pilots that may or may not connect to a larger business objective. 

Employees wonder what AI means for their jobs and whether they should be excited, worried, or both. 

At the other extreme, leaders can make major decisions before there is a real plan for how AI will actually be incorporated into the work.  

Eliminating jobs because “AI will do the work” is not an AI strategy. 

It is very different from having redesigned the work so AI can actually do it. 

I have seen organizations eliminate roles before the work was redesigned and the technology was ready. It does not end well. 

In all of this activity, an organization can lose sight of something much more fundamental: 

What made the company successful in the first place? 

The organization does not need the perfect answer before it moves. 

But leadership does need enough alignment to make choices:  

-What are we trying to accomplish?  

-Which objectives matter most?  

-What tradeoffs are we willing to make? 

Otherwise, the organization may appear to be moving on AI while different parts of the business are actually moving in different directions.