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Companies Are Pouring Money Into AI. Only 1% Believe They’re Ready
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Artificial intelligence has become one of the largest corporate investments in decades. A report by McKinsey highlights that 92 percent of organizations expect to significantly boost their investments in artificial intelligence over the next three years, yet only one percent consider themselves mature in deploying AI at scale. The technology’s potential is widely accepted. The challenge lies in turning that investment into lasting business value rather than isolated productivity gains. As organizations rush to automate more work, an increasingly important question is emerging: are companies becoming more efficient at the expense of becoming less resilient?
That concern is becoming a boardroom priority. A Deloitte Global survey shows that 71 percent of directors and C-suite executives believe boards view strategic risk oversight and scenario planning as critical to organizational resilience. Nearly three-quarters also reported that boards have increased their involvement in long-term strategy and scenario planning, reflecting a broader shift away from viewing resilience as simply a risk-management function and toward treating it as a competitive advantage.
The conversation surrounding AI has also become more nuanced. Early excitement centered on automation and efficiency, but attention is rapidly shifting toward implementation. While organizations continue investing aggressively in AI, relatively few have generated meaningful enterprise-wide value because successful transformation depends far more on leadership, organizational design and workforce adaptation than on technology alone. Deloitte’s survey shows that executives are facing growing pressure to demonstrate measurable returns on AI investments rather than simply expanding experimentation.
Together, these developments point toward a broader leadership challenge. For years, organizations optimized for speed, lean operations and maximum efficiency. Those priorities often produced impressive financial results. Yet they also reduced redundancy, compressed decision-making structures and minimized many of the human systems that historically allowed organizations to adapt when disruption occurred. In an economy increasingly defined by technological change, geopolitical uncertainty and evolving workforce expectations, many leaders are beginning to recognize that resilience cannot simply be added after the fact. It must be designed into the organization itself.
Nick Richtsmeier, founder of CultureCraft , believes businesses are beginning to rediscover a lesson they unintentionally spent decades removing. “We spent a generation obsessing over efficiency, only to realize the inefficiencies were load-bearing,” Richtsmeier says. “The things we removed in pursuit of speed were often the very things that allowed organizations to absorb change.”
CultureCraft works with advisory firms, technology companies, educational organizations and other knowledge-based businesses to help leaders strengthen organizational culture, improve strategic alignment and build sustainable growth. Rather than treating culture as a human resources initiative, the firm approaches it as an operating system that influences decision-making, adaptability and long-term performance.
According to Richtsmeier, many organizations unknowingly sacrificed resilience while pursuing operational speed. Mentorship programs were reduced because they appeared inefficient. Cross-functional collaboration gave way to hyper-specialization. Experienced middle managers were viewed as unnecessary overhead. Customer relationships became increasingly transactional as businesses focused on automation and scale. The go-to-market motion became more automated, eliminating human touchpoints and undermining trust in the process.
Those decisions often made perfect financial sense in stable environments. They become far more problematic during periods of disruption.
Artificial intelligence illustrates that challenge clearly. While AI can accelerate analysis, automate repetitive work and improve productivity, it cannot independently build trust, develop future leaders, strengthen organizational judgment or create the relationships that enable companies to navigate uncertainty. Those capabilities remain fundamentally human.
“Everything we genuinely value takes time,” Richtsmeier says. “Trust takes time. Leadership takes time. Great judgment takes time. Technology should strengthen those things, not replace them.”
Richtsmeier notes that organizations succeeding with AI are redesigning workflows, leadership structures and governance alongside technology deployment, instead of treating AI as another software implementation. “The companies creating sustainable advantages are not necessarily those investing the most,” he says. “They are often the ones integrating technology into stronger organizational systems.”
For business leaders, the implication extends well beyond artificial intelligence . Every technological breakthrough introduces new opportunities for efficiency, but it also tests whether organizations have preserved the institutional knowledge, leadership capacity and cultural foundations needed to respond when conditions inevitably change. Competitive advantage may increasingly belong not to the companies that automate the fastest, but to those that combine technological advancement with human resilience. In an era defined by constant disruption, that balance may prove to be one of the most valuable assets any organization can build.
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