This is why your company's AI strategy is failing

"Your company has rolled out AI like it's a new office uniform. Everyone's using it. And unlike most uniforms, people are using it even when they are told not to. As a result, your inbox clears itself, your reports write themselves, and meetings collapse into neat little summaries at the click of a button. You may be even be fantasizing about sending your digital clone to those pointless meetings, and perhaps your colleagues have done so already (which may explain their perfect attendance record)."

"And yet, there's a difference between outsourcing pointless tasks to AI, and making work better (which also requires you to figure out what to do with the time you save). Plainly put, if you are running faster in the wrong direction you will only get to the wrong place faster. This may explain the recent resurgence of an old paradox, Robert Solow's law, which in the late 1980s noted that "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.""

"Part of AI's seduction is its smooth, conversational interface. Ask, and you shall receive. But business value doesn't appear by asking polite questions: It usually requires hard structural change. And so far, AI's biggest impact has been making existing processes leaner, often by replacing the interns and juniors who used to do that work. Think of it as corporate liposuction: It trims the fat, but it doesn't build new muscle."

AI adoption has become pervasive, automating emails, reports, and meeting summaries and even enabling digital clones to attend meetings. Most uses focus on short-term efficiency gains that replace junior roles and trim routine tasks without reworking underlying processes. These marginal improvements can accelerate pursuit of ineffective goals, yielding little net productivity growth and echoing Solow's paradox. Real business value requires structural change and deliberate decisions about how to redeploy time saved, rather than merely making existing processes leaner. Conversational interfaces seduce users, but lasting gains depend on reorganizing work and building new capabilities beyond cost-cutting.

Read at Fast Company