Back in 2023, when almost everyone was caught off guard by the first AI wave, one thing was already clear to me: the enterprise had moved to the center of the AI story. The question was no longer whether large companies would adopt AI. It was whether they would accept what adoption really implied: AI would eventually force a change to the core of the organization itself.
Fast-forward to 2026, and most enterprises have, in one form or another, crossed the adoption threshold. This year they have spent aggressively on models, tokens, copilots, agents, and the infrastructure required to run them, racing from experimentation toward agentic operating models. In that sense, adoption itself is no longer the main constraint.
And that is precisely what makes the current moment so revealing. Once usage becomes abundant, the real bottleneck becomes visible. It is not access to intelligence. It is not even willingness to use it. The hard part is translating all of that intelligence into deployed business outcomes across an organization. A company can have thousands of employees using AI every day, consume enormous amounts of inference, launch dozens of pilots, and still struggle to show where margin improved, where a workflow fundamentally changed, or where a new competitive capability was created.
I have spent much of my career around enterprise software, working at the intersection of customers, technical teams, and commercial organizations, and this is what feels fundamentally different about AI. With previous software waves, adoption was often the hard part: get the system installed, get people into it, get usage up. With AI, usage can spread almost by itself. The friction appears one level higher, when the organization tries to turn thousands of local productivity gains into one coherent operating model.
Who decides which workflows should be automated? Where does human judgment remain? Which models and agents can act on which data? Who owns the corrections, evaluation sets, and decision history they generate? How does one successful experiment become a company-wide standard rather than another isolated tool?
Those are governance questions. And governance has traditionally been treated as something that comes after innovation: first let teams experiment, then bring in security, legal, procurement, architecture, and the operating model once something starts working. AI turns that sequence upside down. Governance is not the layer that follows the transformation. It is the mechanism that allows the transformation to compound.
Without it, the enterprise can generate enormous activity at the edges while accumulating very little at the center. Every employee gets faster. Every team produces more. Every dashboard turns green. Yet the company can still end up in roughly the same competitive position, because its rivals bought access to the same intelligence at roughly the same time.
That is the tension this piece is trying to unpack. The enterprise AI challenge is no longer principally one of adoption. It is one of organization: how individual gains become coordinated systems, how local discoveries become standards, how the knowledge generated by humans and agents stays with the firm, and how all of it is ultimately aimed at a strategic position competitors cannot reproduce simply by buying the same models.
The transformation therefore does not end when the enterprise adopts AI.
**That is where the difficult part begins, and this book comes in handy. **
**This is a new book in The Business Engineer’s Foundation Series. **
For the last three years, I’ve been rebuilding the Business Engineer’s curriculum from the ground up. That curriculum has now become the foundation of a new discipline, with the entire series taking shape around it.
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