Most AI “strategy” right now isn’t strategy at all. It’s a leadership response to panic.
The suffocating, staring-at-the-ceiling-at-2am kind of panic that sets in when your board’s watching, your ROI dashboards haven’t budged, and your teams are fracturing under the weight of expectations.
WRITER’s latest AI Adoption in the Enterprise report shows just how intense that pressure is: 94% of executives are facing board demands to do more with less. Over three-fourths (78%) are watching AI drive a massive wedge between IT and other lines of business, and 74% say it’s causing tension between executives and employees. Underneath all that is the very real fear that if this doesn’t work, you’re out: 61% of C-suite executives are afraid of losing their jobs over this rollout.
It’s not paranoia. In 2025, CEO departures hit a record high, and just in the last few months we’ve seen a high-profile exodus of CEOs from companies like Adobe, Coca-Cola, and Walmart. Boards are resetting expectations for who can lead through the agentic era.
In a desperate scramble to hold onto their seats, leaders are trading real progress for the illusion of it. They’re buying tools based on the latest hype, mandating them with little training, and spinning layoffs as “AI efficiency” – anything to convince the street that they’ve got it figured out. Strategy in name, but not in any way that actually turns into revenue. In fact, WRITER’s report found fewer than 1 in 4 executives report significant ROI from AI agents.
That’s AI theater. And it’s short-termism at its finest.
Playing to survive the next quarter is a career-ending bill that’s already coming due. The leaders who survive this reckoning know AI only becomes a revenue story when you fundamentally rebuild how work gets done, led by the people closest to it. From what I’m seeing on the ground, here are the four things leaders are doing to get to lasting ROI:
1. Audit the drag, not the headcount
Broken, bureaucratic processes are where AI goes to die. AI adoption begins with fundamentally redesigning workflows with AI at the center.
Start by mapping out the twenty-something-year-old sequence of steps your teams drag through to get anything done. The goal isn’t cutting a 54-step process in half. It’s stripping it down to 4 steps and removing all the coordination threads on Teams, handoffs between three different SaaS tools, and approval routing that adds zero actual judgment. You’ll quickly find that the efficiency gains you wanted from headcount cuts were just hiding in that organizational drag the whole time.
Then take a look at the job itself on the other side of that exercise. When you bring agents into the mix, a workflow that used to take three teams can now be owned by one person end-to-end. That person stops being a task-doer and becomes a system-builder, operating well outside their old job description. Meanwhile the dozens of people who touched that workflow become owners of something entirely new. Redesign roles around that new reality.
2. Put business in the driver’s seat
Your IT team is instrumental to your AI strategy, but they’re not your transformation engine. They don’t know why your star salesperson converts at triple the average or what your brand’s “secret sauce” is. They can’t guess what problems are actually worth solving, or what your next market opportunity is.
I spoke with one executive whose great AI “unlock” was a tool that summarized customer meeting notes. Useful, maybe, but far from transformative. Meanwhile, the teams in the trenches — sales, support, marketing — hadn’t touched the tool. Nobody had asked them what they actually needed. The people who know where the real drag is, where the real value is hiding, are too often the ones furthest from the solutions being built.
Let the people who own the work own the rebuild. Give your sales ops leads, marketing directors, and CS managers the tools to design, deploy, and own their own agentic systems. It should be dead simple for your salesperson to build an agent that pulls brilliant market commentary from your top experts, runs it through marketing’s strict compliance filters, formats it into a personalized cross-sell playbook, and has it delivered directly to her inbox every Monday morning at 9 a.m.
3. Activate your zealots
There’s a clear power law playing out inside every company right now. We can train a thousand people, but about 5% are going to build something remarkable out of the gate. These are your value creation pioneers.
Don’t worry about forcing a massive, 700-person rollout on day one. Just find those “AI champions” first. I was talking with an executive last week who calls them his “zealots.” He found his handful of true believers, deputized them, and then got out of their way. When their work got faster and their outcomes got better, the rest of the org noticed. Turns out envy is a world-class adoption strategy.
Nothing gets people showing up to office hours and getting hands-on like watching a colleague’s workflow run circles around theirs. It stops being a top-down mandate and becomes an organic pull.
4. Shift the KPI from time to leverage
“Hours saved” measures efficiency, or what you stopped doing. Leverage measures what you can now do that was impossible before. Think about how far one person’s judgment can travel or how many places your best thinking can be at once:
- Your head of sales ops spent years building a qualification workflow. Put it in an agent and suddenly the entire global sales team is running her playbook. Every rep, every region, not just the people she’s had time to train.
- Your marketing director’s decade of campaign intuition becomes an agentic workflow that scales across continents without a single 6 a.m. alignment call.
- Your CS lead’s escalation logic – the stuff she carries in her head – runs while the team sleeps and saves accounts they never would have caught.
This is what shows up in your P&L. That’s what you’re actually building toward.
The cost of short-termism
Rebuilding a company while running it is incredibly hard work. Any leader in the trenches right now will tell you that. But your board isn’t waiting, the street isn’t waiting, and your competitors certainly aren’t.
The clock’s ticking to prove actual results. But there’s a massive difference between moving fast and faking it.
Responding to boardroom panic with performative moves is a guaranteed path to irrelevance. Before you greenlight another disconnected pilot, buy into the next hype cycle, or announce another round of “efficiencies,” ask yourself:
Are you actually transforming your business? Or are you just putting on a show?