The Goldman Sachs CEO differentiates between two types of AI adoption. Giving employees AI tools to make them more productive is relatively easy. The much harder, yet more impactful, challenge is fundamentally re-engineering long-standing, complex processes like customer onboarding from the ground up.

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Despite proven cost efficiencies from deploying fine-tuned AI models, companies report the primary barrier to adoption is human, not technical. The core challenge is overcoming employee inertia and successfully integrating new tools into existing workflows—a classic change management problem.

The biggest resistance to adopting AI coding tools in large companies isn't security or technical limitations, but the challenge of teaching teams new workflows. Success requires not just providing the tool, but actively training people to change their daily habits to leverage it effectively.

Notion's CEO compares current AI adoption to swapping a water wheel for a steam engine but keeping the factory layout the same. The real gains will come from fundamentally rethinking workflows, meetings, and hierarchies to leverage AI that works 24/7, rather than just layering it onto existing processes.

A critical error in AI integration is automating existing, often clunky, processes. Instead, companies should use AI as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink and redesign workflows from the ground up to achieve the desired outcome in a more efficient and customer-centric way.

Shifting the mindset from viewing AI as a simple tool to a 'digital worker' allows businesses to extract significantly more value. This involves onboarding, training, and managing the AI like a new hire, leading to deeper integration, better performance, and higher ROI.

The biggest mistake in AI adoption is simply automating an existing manual workflow, which creates an efficient but still flawed process. True transformation occurs when AI enables a completely new, non-human way of achieving an outcome, changing the process itself rather than just the actor performing it.

The most significant gains from AI will not come from automating existing human tasks. Instead, value is unlocked by allowing AI agents to develop entirely new, non-human processes to achieve goals. This requires a shift from process mapping to goal-oriented process invention.

The greatest value of AI isn't just automating tasks within your current process. Leaders should use AI to fundamentally question the workflow itself, asking it to suggest entirely new, more efficient, and innovative ways to achieve business goals.

While AI models improved 40-60% and consumer use is high, only 5% of enterprise GenAI deployments are working. The bottleneck isn't the model's capability but the surrounding challenges of data infrastructure, workflow integration, and establishing trust and validation, a process that could take a decade.

McKinsey finds over half the challenge in leveraging AI is organizational, not technical. To see enterprise-level value, companies must flatten hierarchies, break down departmental silos, and redesign workflows, a process that is proving harder and longer than leaders expect.