Happy Triple Threat Thursday.
Here’s one Signal to notice, one thing to Spark growth and one Shift to consider.
This week's theme: Adopting AI is the wrong goal.
Companies don't stall on AI because of the tools. They stall when "adopt AI" or "integrate it into the org" becomes the objective. That turns AI into a program to roll out instead of a fix to point at something specific. The companies getting value skipped the rollout. They took one or two constraints and used AI to automate a system that already worked. This week is about that order of operations.
📡 Signal — What’s Changing
Why does trying to adopt AI across the company stall the business?
A 40-person accounting firm named a “Director of AI” last year to drive adoption. Within two quarters the role had run six pilots and built a company-wide prompt library. Every update showed motion. At year end, the CEO asked what the AI work had changed in revenue or margin. Nobody could name a number.
Grant Thornton's 2026 AI Impact Survey of 950 executives found the same pattern at scale. Companies are winning on breadth and losing on depth: more pilots, more functions touched, no owner accountable for an outcome. Firms with fully integrated AI are nearly four times more likely to report revenue growth than those still piloting, 58% versus 15%. The difference is not the technology. It is whether the work was aimed at a specific result.
Chasing adoption hides this, because activity looks like progress. The dashboard fills up. Productivity may even rise in a few spots. But the P&L does not move. In the worst case it moves the wrong way, because you are now paying for tools that change nothing on the bottom line.
Why it matters now: "Drive AI adoption" sounds like a goal. It is a vanity target. It rewards rollout and tool count, neither of which carries a number. Adoption is what happens after AI solves something real. It is not the thing you pursue first.
What to do this week: List where AI is being used across the company right now. Then name your single biggest bottleneck, the one step where revenue, time, or margin leaks most. If those two lists do not overlap, you have found the problem.
Adoption is a result of value, not a substitute for it.
⚡ Spark — What to Try This Week
How do you pick the one or two areas where AI actually moves the business?
Most AI plans start with the tool and hunt for a place to use it. This reverses the order. You start with the constraint and bring AI in only if the system underneath already works.
This repeats because AI gets pointed at what is interesting or easy to demo, not at the places where output is actually capped.
Do this:
Map where work backs up. Find the one or two steps where deals, hours, or margin get stuck.
Check the system there. If the process is broken, fix the process first. AI on a broken system just automates the mess faster.
Point AI at automating that one step. One constraint, one owner, one number to move.
Prove it, then move to the next. Do not broaden until the first one pays.
You leave with one or two AI efforts tied to your real bottlenecks, instead of a scattered rollout no one can measure.
🔄 Shift — How to Rethink It
Is adopting AI the wrong goal?
Default belief: Getting AI used across the company is the goal, so put someone in charge of driving it.
Flip: Adopting AI is not a goal you can hit. Fix the one or two places the business is actually stuck, and the rest of the company picks it up on its own.
One company stood up a three-person AI group to drive adoption. Adoption climbed, tools rolled out, training filled calendars. Eighteen months later leadership could list everything shipped and could not point to a deal, hour, or dollar that changed. A second company skipped the program and automated one slow step in its quoting process, cutting turnaround in half. Within a quarter, three other teams asked to do the same.
Why it matters: Adoption-first scales effort. Constraint-first scales results. One fills a report. The other shows up in the business.
Drop adoption and usage from your AI progress updates.
Put one number and one owner on every AI effort still running.
Cut anything that cannot name the number it moves.
The version of this story that ends well has one difference: someone could name the number.
📚 Worth A Look
What should you be reading about AI adoption and ROI this week?
A new Gartner study finds workforce cuts tied to AI show no correlation with higher ROI, which is what happens when breadth becomes the goal instead of a specific outcome.
A clear breakdown of why narrow pilots succeed and broad rollouts stall, built on one idea: someone has to own the outcome, not the algorithm.
Worth it for one finding. Three-quarters of executives admit their AI strategy is more for show than real guidance, which is what pursuing adoption without a target looks like.
📈 TL;DR
Companies stall when adopting AI becomes the goal. Point it at one or two real bottlenecks, prove the gain, and let it spread from there.
📈 One Question
What is the one constraint in your business where AI, pointed at a system that already works, would move a number this quarter?
Thanks for reading Triple Threat. See you next Thursday with another Signal, Spark, and Shift.
— Alexandria Ohlinger
p.s. If this helped you think sharper or move faster, share it with someone who builds the way you do. And if you want more practical insight between issues, connect with me on LinkedIn or schedule a strategy session.