Competition may force adoption, but the internal principal-agent problem helps explain why spending can rise while redesign stalls. The managers asked to eliminate coordination layers may be evaluating a system that weakens their own authority, so ‘AI adoption’ becomes a safer substitute for changing decision rights. The real unit of transformation may be the decision boundary: who decides, who verifies, and who absorbs failure. What governance structure have you seen overcome that incentive without turning redesign into a permanent committee?
Thank you — I think this gets to the core of it. The hard part is not adopting AI, but changing who can make decisions and who is accountable when something goes wrong.
A structure that may help is to give small cross-functional teams a clear, limited decision area, with measurable outcomes and an explicit human escalation path. That makes experimentation safer, while preventing every change from becoming a large approval process. The goal is not to remove managers, but to move their role from controlling each step to setting boundaries, incentives, and accountability.
Competition may force adoption, but the internal principal-agent problem helps explain why spending can rise while redesign stalls. The managers asked to eliminate coordination layers may be evaluating a system that weakens their own authority, so ‘AI adoption’ becomes a safer substitute for changing decision rights. The real unit of transformation may be the decision boundary: who decides, who verifies, and who absorbs failure. What governance structure have you seen overcome that incentive without turning redesign into a permanent committee?
Thank you — I think this gets to the core of it. The hard part is not adopting AI, but changing who can make decisions and who is accountable when something goes wrong.
A structure that may help is to give small cross-functional teams a clear, limited decision area, with measurable outcomes and an explicit human escalation path. That makes experimentation safer, while preventing every change from becoming a large approval process. The goal is not to remove managers, but to move their role from controlling each step to setting boundaries, incentives, and accountability.