By Naomi Withers | WBN News | September 30, 2026 Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free

Two people described the same AI rollout to me in the same week.

The owner said it was going well. The tool was in, the team had access, the training happened in the spring.

Someone on that team said not much had changed. They still export the file by hand, because the new system does not talk to the old one.

Both were telling the truth.

They Are Measuring Different Things

The owner is measuring the decision. It got made, it got paid for, it got announced.

The team is measuring the work. What is actually different on a Tuesday.

The distance between those two measurements is where most of the money goes. It is also nearly invisible from the top, because nobody schedules a meeting to report that the workaround is still the workaround.

By The Numbers

The 2026 research is unusually specific about what goes wrong.

A study of 600 US IT and business leaders, published by DDN in January 2026, found that 65 percent said their AI environments were already too complex to manage. Fifty-four percent had delayed or canceled AI initiatives in the previous two years.

The reason matters as much as the number. Not that staff refused to adopt. Not that the tools underperformed. Complexity that nobody sized before starting.

The workforce story runs the same way. In an October 2025 Gartner survey of 321 customer service and support leaders, only 20 percent said AI had reduced their agent headcount. In February 2026 Gartner went further, predicting that half the companies that did cut roles citing AI will rehire for similar work by 2027 under different titles. Forrester's 2026 predictions expect much the same reversal, with those jobs returning offshore or at lower pay.

Those last figures describe customer service specifically, and one function does not speak for all of them. Both are also forecasts rather than measurements. But the direction is consistent, and it does not match the story most owners are being told.

Complexity Looks Different At Your Size

For a business of forty people, complexity is usually not cloud infrastructure.

It is three tools where two of them will not talk to the third. It is nobody owning the customer list, so two departments quietly keep separate versions. It is the person who set the whole thing up having left in March.

None of that appears on a budget line. All of it decides whether the investment returns anything.

Why It Stays Invisible

An owner sees the decision, the invoice, and the launch email.

What an owner does not see is the workaround, and people rarely volunteer it. Saying the new system is awkward sounds like complaining about something the boss just bought.

So the gap holds. The rollout looks finished from one chair and unfinished from another, and nobody is lying.

Three Questions Worth Asking

Ask someone who uses the tool daily what they still do by hand.

Ask who owns the data when two systems disagree.

Ask what would break if the person who set it up left tomorrow.

The answers will tell you more than another vendor demo.

Why It Matters

The companies that see a return from AI over the next two years will not be the ones with the best tools. They will be the ones who found the distance between the decision and the desk, and closed it.

That distance does not close on its own, and it does not show up on a dashboard. It shows up when you ask.

Confidence and visibility are not the same thing. Only one of them can be checked, and it is worth checking this quarter.

Adapted from an article first published on the Growth Consultant Services blog: The Confidence Gap Your AI Strategy Can't Survive

About The Author

Naomi Withers | WBN News https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-withers-7044491b/

Naomi Withers is the founder of Growth Consultant Services, where she advises founders, CEOs, and executive teams on AI strategy, executive coaching, and high-performance leadership. Her AI Transformation Diagnostic is a free place to start. She writes at growthconsultantservices.com.

Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free

Tags: #Naomi Withers #WBN News #Artificial Intelligence #AI Strategy #Business Growth #Change Management

Share this article
The link has been copied!