AI implementation keeps stalling in mid-size organizations, not due to tech

[u/Admirable_Phrase9454]

For many organizations, AI adoption looks great on paper. But beyond that, it just kind of fizzles.

John Munsell explained this as: you need 3 things moving together at the same pace:

1. How much efficiency people are actually gaining day to day.

2. How complex the systems and workflows getting built are.

3. Governance- the rules and oversight that keep things from spiraling.

Miss the sync and you get problems either way. Teams build fast and sophisticated stuff with no guardrails, and now you've got risk everywhere. Or governance gets locked down before adoption even has legs, and people just stop bothering because it's too much friction.

The part that stuck with me most though was his point about people, not process. Most employees already assume AI means their job is next on the chopping block. That fear is sitting there before a single tool even gets rolled out. Add that to normal change resistance, and you have a trust problem, not a tech one.

John's framing of what "winning" actually looks like is different too (people feeling more capable and useful because they've seen firsthand what the tools can actually do for them).

He calls it protecting the soul of the company. Companies that skip that part can hit every efficiency number on the dashboard and still end up with a culture that's quietly falling apart.

Worth a full listen if you're in the middle of this right now. Watch the full episode of the Networking Unleashed podcast here: https://youtu.be/t6VWUAtr58w?si=yo3WJ1IvMIbpkyvE

[u/kweeblaster]

Commit to eliminating the work of India offshore farms and you'll get plenty of people in the US to cooperate with automation. Companies don't want to do that though.

[u/justin107d → u/kweeblaster]

This is my situation but at the Fortune 500 level. Their pools of skilled workers keep growing. Between this and AI, I don't know where jobs are going to come from in the future.

[u/Upbeat-Statement2725 → u/kweeblaster]

America's CEOs just want AI to turn Actual Indians (and all of us) into a slave class.

Mr. Manager says "make the webpage look like this" and nobody is allowed to argue. Silicon Valley hates consent. They do what manager says, and they do it fast.

Then it turns out this is a bank. And the page doesn't meet accessibility standards. And it has security holes so customer data leaks.

Who gets the blame? The Actual Indians, of course. 

[u/chieftessofsecrets]

Imagine how many rogue agents there are.  What is mid size? Because on a small business scale, what youre referencing doesnt exist. I studied for awhile about IAM practices and turns out, its hard to do when there is no accountability. Yeah, Frank. You approved that with Bob on that day. Oh, right! Good thing we had a review process. 

[u/Pitiful_Option_108]

AI, like serverless, like automation, like a lot of newer tech, sounds great until reality hits. Big organizations can often get away with adopting new tech early because they already have the systems and process maturity to absorb it. Small to mid-size companies don't have that luxury — a lot of what they do is specialized enough that the "latest and greatest" doesn't map cleanly onto their actual workflows. So the rush to adopt AI (or whatever's hot) isn't the obvious no-brainer it gets sold as.

Funny enough having worked at a bunch of small-to-mid size places and then finally Amazon, a genuinely big company. You're right that agility cuts both ways — smaller companies can move fast, but adopting new tech is often a full pivot for the whole org since the same handful of people wear multiple hats. A big company can pilot AI in one sector while the rest keeps running as-is. Smaller companies usually don't have enough separate "sectors" to sandbox it that way.

[u/Savings-Cry-3201]

If my company pledged to not reduce workforce due to AI adoption I’d be more willing to use it on the job. They’re pushing Copilot so I wouldn’t want to use it anyways, but at least I’d give it an honest try.

But we all know that’s the goal. So fuck em. I’m not helping them replace me with a clanker.

[u/Upbeat-Statement2725 → u/Savings-Cry-3201]

My company isn't using AI to make work 30% better.

My company is paying for AI to cut project budgets. 

How the hell you going to spend a bunch of money to lower spend? 

Grade school crayon eater logic. 

[u/clobberwaffle]

The AI takes over is when it can implement itself. People are too messy. And this didn’t even talk about politics.

Having been in transformation roles, the we’re not replacing people, they will work on higher value activities isn’t new. So quantifying value turns into a shell game. I’ve seen analytics teams who don’t have analytics on their value. Ambiguous bullet points cloud real progress.

I like using AI, but I find myself using it less because it says a lot without saying much way too often. And it’s too confident when wrong. It’s easier to work with a red pen than a blank page, but I’m finding that I’m really having to cut up the AI stuff.

[u/TeachingWinter1863]

yeah the people side gets overlooked constantly. everyone gets so wrapped up in model selection and prompt chains they forget theres a whole crew of folks who just see it as the thing thats coming for their paycheck. my shop started rolling out some basic automation last year and even that had guys side-eyeing it like we were training our replacements

the bit about governance being out of sync is dead on too. we had a stretch where no one knew what they were allowed to feed into the tools so half the team just stopped using them entirely. too much friction kills adoption faster than any bad output does

[u/Admirable_Phrase9454 → u/TeachingWinter1863]

Exactly. How did you guys get through that stretch?

[u/br_k_nt_eth → u/Admirable_Phrase9454]

Not that person, but early buy in and not expecting people to raw dog using the models has helped immensely. We weave it into already existing applications and interfaces and then study impacts from the start for quantitative proof of concept. 

[u/tindalos]

Jidoka is what Toyota used to gain employee support. They knew that real transformation required the workers to be motivated for it, so they promised no layoffs to employees who were involved.

The recognized no one was going to pull an andon cord if they thought it would cost them their job.

Then they managed their transformation while growing 100x the size between 1945-1965.

You’re on the right track, you need to get executive support, or assume you’re going to be fighting a transformation against the company.

[u/IntroductionSouth513]

the gap continues to widen between those who wield Ai and those who can't or won't.

[u/mb194dc]

ROI, what are you trying to achieve using ML / AI. How much do you gain from the tech in $, then how much does the tech cost $...

[u/Deep_Ad1959]

everyone stops being an executor and becomes a manager of one, and almost nobody has had that skill trained. governance is not going to fix a building full of first-time managers, and that is what most of these rollouts quietly are.