Your AI Strategy is a People Strategy

Organizations worldwide invested roughly $40 billion in AI last year, according to MIT research. 95% saw no measurable impact on profit.

An NBER survey of executives across four countries found that 89% reported no effect on labor productivity. And, at the same time, Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report finds that 65% of workers inside those same organizations say AI has made them personally more productive.

Sit with that for a moment. People are doing more, but organizations are getting less. Something is being lost in translation, and it isn’t the technology.

Linda Hill has spent thirty years studying what happens inside organizations when transformation is attempted. Her finding, consistent across decades and sectors, is that the rarest and most consequential capacity an organization can have is not the ability to adopt new tools. It is the ability to create conditions where human contribution can actually go somewhere.

She calls it co-creation. And most organizations attempting AI transformation have skipped it entirely.

The pattern Hill sees in failed transformations is almost always the same. Leaders invest heavily in the hands, the tools, the training, the workflows, without doing the harder upstream work on hearts and heads that includes meaning, trust, and identity, and mental models that frame technological use. The human inner environment where all that new capacity either takes root or, not-so-quietly, dissipates.

High hands, low hearts, according to Hill, is the most dangerous and most common profile in AI rollouts today.

The 2026 Gallup State of the Global Workplace data lands on the same finding from a different lens. Employees who have a manager actively championing AI are 8.7 times more likely to say their work has been genuinely transformed by it. The manager, not the technology, makes the difference. The human being who made the work feel like it mattered enough to engage with it differently is the linchpin.

That’s not a technology result; that’s a culture result.

Here is what the gap looks like in practice. Your team adopts an AI tool, and productivity per person rises. But few teams think carefully about what they are now freed to do with that capacity.

Few ask the harder question: what are we building, and does everyone in this room have a clear enough picture of it to aim their extra capacity in the same direction? So people work faster and more efficiently, toward their own interpretations of what matters, making them, but not the team or company, more productive—the gains circle down the drain.

Hill calls this a co-creation failure. The people closest to the work were never invited to shape the questions. The failure is that leadership or management handed them an answer.

There’s one more thread in the Gallup data worth calling out. Global employee engagement just fell for the second consecutive year — something that has never happened in Gallup’s history of tracking it. Engagement, in their framing, is a measure of psychological attachment to work, to team, to organizational purpose. It is, among other things, a measure of readiness for change.

Disengaged organizations can’t absorb the gains that AI makes possible. Not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the people using it have already silently stopped believing their contribution is going anywhere worth going.

The efficiency is there, but the individual and team-aligned direction is missing.

What Hill’s research asks of leaders isn’t complicated, but it’s demanding. Before you accelerate capability, build the conditions for the team to thrive. Run the team-wide conversations before the tool deployment.

Ask your people: what does this change? What stays the same? What are you worried about? And make sure there’s a meaningful forum for those answers, not just an open-door policy nobody uses.

The organizations getting AI right are not the ones with the best tools; they’re the ones where people can locate themselves inside the story of what is being built, where the why is human, not just operational.

Forty billion dollars’ worth of efficiency is looking for somewhere to go. The only place it goes is into a culture that was ready to receive it.

If you want a more trusting team, a culture of belonging or a magnetic brand that attracts more of the right customers, I can help. If you'd like to explore if working together makes sense, drop me a line.

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