Right on Schedule
Almost every day we speak with CEOs, Unit heads, and P&L owners who worry their organization is going too slow. I have yet to meet one that feels their company and team is going fast enough. Not one has ever said to me they have to slow their team down. The pace right now is near frenetic. Relentless. But here’s a quiet truth: they are right on schedule.
First full disclosure. My colleague decided to train Claude to blog with my tone and voice. (After which he quoted Claude as describing that as: “warm, first-person, metaphor-rich, current-events-anchored, framework-driven, opinionated, and built to move the reader to act,”) followed by a smiley emoji.
Here is what came out the other side.
“Set the clock at ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, and we’re barely three and a half years in. That’s the first lap, not the finish line. And here’s the thing about a general-purpose technology — the tech is the cheap part. The payoff shows up later, and only after the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding the business around it. History is broken-record consistent on this. So is our own industry’s memory.
Look back.
- Electricity lit its first homes in 1880, but by 1900 only about 3% of houses had electric light. The productivity boom didn’t hit until the 1920s — when factories were finally redesigned around what electricity made possible, not just wired in where the steam engine used to sit.
- The automobile? Cars were on the road by the early 1900s, but the real windfall came decades later, once we rebuilt the world around them — highways, suburbs, supply chains.
- Cloud came, everyone rushed skyward, and value rained down only on the firms that re-architected for it. The rest inherited sprawl, waste, and surprise bills — roughly 29% of cloud spend is still wasted.
- Mobile spread like wildfire, but the winners rebuilt around what mobile uniquely made possible while everyone else just shrank their website onto a phone. (Anthea the human here: BTW, the same thing happened with print to web.)
- Social, same story. Brands stampeded onto every platform; the returns went to the ones who rethought how they engage, not the ones who broadcast the same old ads in a shiny new place.
- Even our own analytics waves — BI, then Business Analytics — were the warm-up act for today’s Applied Intelligence, rewarding the firms that rebuilt their decisions around the insight, not the ones who simply bought the dashboards.
The value never came from buying the technology. It came from the organizations that reinvented themselves around it. The winners weren’t the earliest adopters. They were the earliest re-inventors. (Bold italics are mine for emphasis.)”
Not bad, huh? I love to write and don’t intend to run this little experiment every week or even much at all/ever. So, I’ll end this piece with the real me and not the machine-made me.
This is why I believe we are on schedule and “adoption is ahead of value.” It’s early days. Sure, things are moving fast; using this new profound technology is about so much more than process redesign, retraining, reorganization, and the early deployment reflected in last week’s post about its use in operating use cases.
The fun, hard work, and creative part come from new talent, fresh eyes, and being willing to reinvent from the ground up, working with the best and brightest, and completely new ways of doing things.
Our early days of experimentation will give way to AI ROI as our tinkering moves to reinvention. We will also see the same themes play out as with other major platform shifts, only more dramatically and likely with an economic shock or stock market blip and some geopolitical drama thrown in for good measure.
Big companies will buy AI natives instead of digital natives. Big info will compete with big tech – this time with decent cards to play given big tech’s machines don’t operate without big info. This is another wave of massive change. And we are right on schedule. Our calling now? Being a re-inventor.
So slow down to speed up and join us October 1, 2026, at the Outsell CEO Summit in London. By invitation, we’ll review these themes and more and put them to work. Be on time, and we’ll see you there.