The tools are faster, better, and cheaper than they were twelve months ago. Teams are using them. Output is going up and everyone is busy telling the story of how AI is transforming their marketing.
There’s a few things that I am actually seeing underneath that story that paint a different picture.
AI is speeding up execution, I do not disagree with this. But in a business without clear strategic direction, faster execution means you could end up going in the wrong direction more efficiently. The gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what’s actually happening on the ground is wider than most founders realise.
Research published in February 2026 from Harvard Business School found that senior leaders are consistently struggling with AI adoption - not because the tools are complex, but because of what one researcher described as “contested definitions of value.” In other words, nobody has agreed what success looks like. Team adopts the tools, activity increases and the founder looks at the outputs and wonders why the business isn’t moving faster.
Over 80% of business leaders are confident in their oversight of AI execution, while 75% of the end users believe leadership underestimates how hard AI execution actually is. That gap has a name that one analyst called the “visibility mirage” - where leaders and practitioners are looking at entirely different versions of progress.
This is the leadership problem AI is exposing. It was always there. AI just makes it impossible to ignore now.
The businesses I see getting genuine value from AI have one thing in common before they start. They’ve already made the hard decisions about what matters. They know their primary channel. They know their core offer. They know what the team is supposed to be doing. When AI arrives into that clarity, it accelerates the right things.
When it arrives into ambiguity, it accelerates the chaos.
The question to ask before investing more time in AI tools isn’t “which tools should we use?” It’s “are we clear enough about where we’re going for AI to be worth deploying yet?”
Most businesses aren’t. And that’s not a technology problem.
If this sounds familiar in your business, I’d be curious to know where the clarity gap actually sits. Hit reply.
Source reference: Harvard Business Review, February 2026 - Where Senior Leaders Are Struggling with AI Adoption
