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By Josh Leibner
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Companies might be investing more in artificial intelligence than ever before, but the scale of their investment does not guarantee meaningful results.
Goldman Sachs Research says global AI investment could exceed $1 trillion in 2026, roughly $581 billion of that in the United States. Yet Gartner says that by the end of 2025, at least 50 percent of generative AI projects had been abandoned after proof of concept.
We have never had more technology, more investment, or more strategic attention directed toward AI transformation, but that can all be wasted when there's a lack of organizational alignment within the project.
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The problem is not necessarily that leaders have chosen the wrong technology or failed to establish a strategy. In many organizations I have worked with, the strategy is clear. The investment has been approved. The transformation has been announced. People have agreed to move forward.
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But agreement is not the same as commitment, and consensus is not the same as alignment.
When leaders mistake tacit agreement by a workforce for genuine ownership of the new technology, organizations can appear to be moving forward while they are quietly losing the conditions required to execute the transformation.
That distinction matters even more as companies restructure around efficiency and AI adoption. Reuters has reported workforce reductions at several major U.S. companies as organizations streamline operations amid technological change.
Reporting lines shift. Responsibilities change. Teams are asked to do more with different resources. Yet through all of that disruption, execution still depends on people understanding what is changing, why it matters, and what they personally own.
A Nod in the Wrong Direction?
The human dimension of transformation may be easy to overlook because it can be harder to measure than technology spending or organizational charts. A 2026 systematic literature review in Management Review Quarterly examined 50 empirical studies on “quiet quitting,” which suggests something leaders should already understand.
Workplace conditions, relationships, expectations, and management behavior influence how people engage with the organizations they are being asked to transform.
I have seen leaders spend enormous amounts of time determining where an organization needs to go while spending far less time examining what will actually cause people to move in that direction.
A leadership team can leave a meeting believing everyone is aligned because nobody openly objected. But silence is not commitment. A nod is not ownership. And a decision that receives broad agreement can still fail when the people responsible for executing it have not meaningfully committed themselves to the outcome.
My perspective on this issue has been shaped by my work in organizational transformation, including technology-related change. As founder and president of The Strategic Commitment Group, I have spent years examining what happens between a strategy being approved and an organization actually acting on it.
The Crucial Connection
Earlier in my career, I saw firsthand that connecting systems was not the same as connecting people.
You can connect every computer in the company, but real progress comes from how people engage with one another and with the work itself. Technology can make information available, accelerate processes, and create entirely new capabilities.
But it cannot create trust between leaders and employees. It cannot resolve an unspoken disagreement. And it cannot make someone personally accountable for a strategic decision they never truly committed to.
That is why I believe organizations need to pay greater attention to what happens after the strategy is approved. Strategic planning can consume enormous amounts of executive time and energy, but the conditions that allow those plans to take hold are often left unaddressed. Trust, candor, accountability, and the willingness to confront difficult differences are not peripheral to execution. They are part of the infrastructure that makes execution possible.
The distinction between consensus and alignment is particularly important. Consensus can mean that a group has reached a decision everyone is willing to accept. But alignment goes further. To me, it requires people to engage honestly with differences, understand the direction being taken, and accept responsibility for helping make that direction successful.
I have seen leaders settle for tacit agreement because it feels like progress, but agreement alone does not mean people are truly stepping up to own the work.
Creating that kind of alignment requires more than another leadership meeting. Organizations need environments where people can speak candidly about what is working, what is not, and what they believe will stand in the way of execution.
Leading by Example
Leaders need to define the future state they are trying to create, establish specific strategic commitments and clarify who is accountable for delivering them.
That conversation cannot remain confined to the executive team. Managers, employees, stakeholders and customers may all hold information leadership needs to be aware of before a strategy becomes operational.
Leadership needs to be exemplary. Executives cannot ask an organization to embrace accountability while avoiding accountability themselves.
They cannot ask employees to speak candidly while responding defensively to difficult feedback. And they cannot create trust through a single town hall or strategy presentation. Trust in my experience develops through consistency in how leaders communicate, make decisions, respond to challenges, and follow through.
This is ultimately what I mean by organizational velocity. Velocity is not simply how quickly an organization moves. It reflects directional progress: whether the effort being expended is actually producing meaningful outcomes. An organization can move extremely fast in the wrong direction. It can launch initiatives, restructure teams, purchase technology, and hold strategy meetings while making surprisingly little progress toward the outcome it intended to achieve.
Align in the Sand
I'm betting that AI will continue to transform how organizations operate, for better or worse. Investment will continue to grow, technologies will continue to evolve, and companies will continue to restructure around new capabilities.
But the organizations that turn those investments into meaningful outcomes will depend on the people involved in the transformation. Leaders need to create the conditions for honest dialogue, meaningful participation, shared accountability and genuine ownership.
The question facing executives is therefore not simply whether their people agreed with the strategy. It is whether those people are genuinely aligned behind it.
In an era of extraordinary technological investment, leaders should look beyond whether a strategy has been approved and ask whether the people responsible for delivering it understand it, believe in their role within it, and are prepared to take ownership of the outcome.
If they are not, the next step should not simply be another technology investment or strategy meeting. It should be a deliberate effort to build the alignment required to make the strategy work.
Josh Leibner is the founder of The Strategic Commitment Group, which provides paid consulting on organizational alignment and execution, the subjects discussed in this article. He is a co-author of The Power of Strategic Commitment.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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