AI adoption is booming but productivity gains remain elusive because most corporate work involves coordination and meetings rather than production tasks. While AI costs are minimal (~$12.50 per employee monthly), returns depend on how firms reorganize workflows around the technology—top performers see 1.9x revenue gains, but typical companies see minimal movement, suggesting organizational redesign, not just tool deployment, drives ROI.
An SVP's approach to incident postmortems reframes the goal from understanding why failures occurred to identifying systemic changes that prevent recurrence. Rather than accepting reasonable explanations for problems, the focus should be on fixing the system and processes, not blaming people, to drive lasting organizational improvement.