Published: June 2026 | OpenNova
In the last few months, we’ve had versions of the same conversation with directors, managers, engineers, architects, and executives. The details change. The question underneath them usually doesn’t:
What are we supposed to become on the other side of this?
Almost no one is waiting for permission to use the tools. Most already are. That’s not the question of someone resisting, and it isn’t someone asking how to use the thing. It’s the question of someone who can already feel the work changing and can’t yet name where it’s supposed to land. Some version of it keeps showing up in almost every conversation.
The agreement is real. The certainty isn’t.
Most of the playbooks for new technology in the enterprise are built around reluctance: change management, skeptical employees, fear of being replaced. That playbook may be right somewhere. It doesn’t match what we’re hearing.
What we hear instead is agreement. Everyone agrees AI matters. Everyone agrees it’s not a fad. What’s far less settled is the definition of success. Plenty of managers can tell you what they think winning looks like. The problem is that their version may not match leadership’s, or finance’s, or the board’s, or HR’s. Almost nobody can say with confidence how their organization actually intends to measure success. The agreement is universal and the certainty is missing, and the gap between those two things is where most people are currently living.
Why the answer isn’t coming
No one is withholding it. Most companies can’t produce it as fast as the question is being asked.
Enterprise governance moves at the speed of review cycles, security assessments, and legal approval. The tools move at the speed of a consumer app store. By the time a policy is drafted, circulated, and approved, the landscape it was written to govern has already shifted. A June survey from CIO.com and IBM found that 77% of technology leaders say AI adoption inside their organizations is outpacing their ability to govern it.
And where direction has shown up, it often hasn’t been the kind anyone needed. Over the past couple of months we’ve watched companies hand employees open token budgets and run contests around usage. If you’re not hitting your limit, you’re not working hard enough. The costs are already pulling some of those programs back, and Cognizant’s CEO had a name for the metric before the bills did: vanity. Telling people to use more of something is not the same as telling them what it’s for.
It’s worth being precise about where the gap actually sits. The strategy isn’t missing at the top. The evidence is. Leaders have committed to numbers and timelines, often with a board or a PE firm behind them, and the organization underneath them can’t yet measure whether any of it is earning its keep. So the direction that reaches the people doing the work arrives as a target, not an answer. They’re left to supply the certainty themselves.
What the steadier ones are doing
The people navigating this well, at every level, tend to share a few habits. They force specificity upward. Handed a broad mandate, they ask what success looks like for their function before accepting it as is. They make the current state legible before promising a future one, because you can’t improve a workflow nobody can describe. And they run small, instrumented experiments instead of broad enthusiasm, so that when the questions come, and they’re coming, they’re reporting evidence rather than optimism.
None of that requires permission. Most of it builds the kind of standing that survives whatever the eventual policy says.
The question
Agreement was the easy part. Everyone cleared that bar months ago. Certainty is the actual work, and right now most of it is being done quietly, unofficially, by people supplying answers their organizations haven’t given them yet.
So the question worth sitting with isn’t whether your people know this matters. Most already do. It’s whether anyone, at the top, in the middle, or closest to the work, could yet say out loud what success is supposed to look like. The tools aren’t waiting for that answer. Neither are the people asking for it.
The organizations handling this best aren’t following a playbook. They’re figuring it out in real time. If you’re working through these questions too, we’re always glad to compare notes. A lot of what ends up in The Pulse starts as exactly these kinds of conversations.
