This week Wharton gave everyone whiplash.
We were just done processing MIT’s aggressive headline—95% of AI projects fail—when Wharton dropped their study saying 75% of enterprises succeed.
They can’t both be right.
If you’re exhausted by the headline whiplash, I get it. I am too.
Every week there’s a new study: AI is revolutionary. AI is overhyped. Companies are winning. Companies are failing.
The narrative keeps shifting and leaders keep asking me: what is actually happening?
I can tell you that, because I work with them.
Here’s what’s actually happening: while everyone argues about whether AI works, AI-native organizations put their heads down and focus on building institutional fluency in AI.
What does that mean? At it’s simplest: these companies are learning to solve problems across the business with intelligence. They’re not getting spun by contradictory headlines. They’re putting their heads down and building steady value.
I wrote about how leaders can develop individual AI fluency a couple of weeks ago—the difference between people who use AI and people with fluency that compounds.
This is the companion piece. This is about institutional AI fluency. How organizations build the capability to solve problems with intelligence at scale.
What is institutional fluency anyway?
It’s pretty simple: an organization can have lots of AI fluent people, and still not be seeing as much upside as it should simply because the institution itself remains stuck in old ways of working. All the structures of the business can reinforce the dead past while execs preach AI adoption at All Hands meetings—in fact, I see that a lot.
Looking across dozens of deployments I’ve been involved with, I’ve seen three consistent keys to developing institutional AI fluency:
Context fluency (a brand new skill even for expert teams)
The ownership-skills inversion (this breaks the way corporations have organized for centuries—and most haven’t figured it out yet)
Democratized taste (the Steve Jobs model is dead, but few know how to build what comes next)
I’ve seen over and over again that companies that focus on these three capabilities actually do win. They don’t need to care about whatever study comes out next week.
If you focus on these three, you’ll be learning the institutional skill of solving problems with intelligence, and you’ll be able to fully leverage the skills of your most AI fluent leaders and teams.
And yes, of course there’s a conversational prompt to help you assess your actual teams and figure out which of these you need to work on first. I want you to have everything you need to actually get focused so you don’t have to worry about the headlines.
We’re in the midst of the biggest change in corporate structures and ways of working in centuries. I want you to have the tools to build an AI-native organization, and to sustain your competitive advantage for the next decade.
Let’s get into it.
This is an Executive Circle briefing, a Sunday newsletter exclusively for Founding Tier Members. You can learn more via this 60 second video explaining what’s in each tier, and you can change your plan here. Enjoy, and back to regular programming Monday!
