​Here’s The Difference Between AI Adoption And AI Transformation

Grisha Pavlotsky, Chief Transformation Officer at Miro.

​Somewhere in your company, someone is having the best idea of the quarter. They are having it in a chat window, alone with an AI, and no one else will ever see it.

Silos have been and always will be the enemy of speed. AI was supposed to help (and it still can), but in the meantime, it quietly built a new silo for every individual in your company.

Understanding That AI Fluency Is Not Transformation

Let’s think about what actually happens when someone does good work with AI.

The real work likely happened during a private brainstorm session where ideas got tested, trade-offs got argued, wrong turns got taken and dropped, and the reasoning took shape. What ships is a conclusion which is really just the tip of an iceberg with tons of context that no one will get to see or experience. And all of the stuff that came before the artifact is where a teammate could have built on or pushed back on. It’s an opportunity for healthy friction that has been missed.

Individual adopters of AI tools may report something like five times the output, while according to IBM, only 29% of companies can confidently measure any ROI.

I first heard the term “silos of one” from Matt LeMay, who studies how product teams communicate. His warning is that if we skip the slow work of actually talking to each other, “We’re going to 10x our misalignments, not our outcomes. We’re going to wind up with silos of one, shipping disconnected things that don’t align into anything meaningful for our business or our customers.”

This idea perfectly illustrates the difference between adopting AI and transforming your company.

Why Your People Are Faster And Your Company Isn’t

The old silos were at least easy to see. A silo was a wall (sometimes literally) between two departments. You had a handful of them, and they were big enough that you knew exactly where they stood. But a problem you can see is at least a problem you can navigate.

1. Human-to-human

2. Human-to-agent