Most executives didn’t adopt AI out of sheer curiosity. They did it because they felt they had to, and many are now quietly wondering why the payoff hasn’t shown up. Recent stats show that 89% of small business owners have someone at their company using AI.
And, if the stats are correct, you’re also most likely frustrated with the ROI you’re getting from your AI. According to a recent McKinsey study, 80% of companies haven’t seen the AI they’ve brought on board improve their performance.
If you find yourself among the 4 out of 5 companies that are waiting anxiously for AI to deliver on its promises, what do you see as your next step? Replace your off-the-shelf platform with a vertical solution? Level up to agentic AI? Put everything back in the box and wait until the technology matures?
If you’re thinking in that direction, then you’re thinking wrong. To make AI work for you, you need to understand that your AI adoption frustrations aren’t the result of technical problems. There’s something deeper at play that is keeping you from leveraging AI to your advantage.
AI doesn’t live in the data center
AI isn’t your average tech tool. But many companies treat it like it is. When they have an issue with AI, they cycle through the normal list of tech responses looking for a solution.
AI is different because it isn’t simply a tool that lives in the data center. Deploy it in your business, and it quickly becomes part of the operational tapestry, influencing a wide range of day-to-day decisions.
Messaging, pricing, hiring, goal setting, and more—every element of your culture—feels the effects of AI. Consequently, the issues you’re having with AI adoption aren’t tech issues; they’re culture issues. Improving your ROI starts with assessing your culture and its approach to AI adoption. Culture doesn’t drift on its own. It reflects what leadership is willing to define, tolerate, and enforce.
AI needs you to hold it accountable
The non-AI tech tools you’re using in your business earn their fees by being available and functional. If your payment processing platform is up and running, then you don’t have a problem. If it goes offline, you have a fire to put out.
AI tools require another level of oversight. In addition to being available and functional, they also need to be accountable. In practice, accountability means someone has the authority to pause, override, or escalate AI decisions when judgment fails. The AI-powered chatbot you have fielding customer service inquiries on your e-commerce site can be online and answering hundreds of questions a day for prospective customers, but it can also be spitting out responses that don’t help those customers or your business.
Your business needs to hold AI tools accountable, ensuring they’re not only available and functional but also effective. To accomplish that, you need a culture that’s willing and able to invest in AI accountability. If no one assesses AI’s performance and sounds the alarm when it falls short, expect to be disappointed.
You need to define and demand good judgment
The tech of the past amplified our efforts. It made us stronger, allowing us to accomplish more work with less effort.
AI seeks not only to make us stronger but also smarter. And one way it does that is by making our decisions for us. As AI moves from generative to agentic, it moves beyond simply offering us advice on the language we should use in our customer service emails. It’s now assessing the requests we are receiving and judging the best way to respond without our input.
To keep AI accountable, we need to make sure it makes sound judgments. In practice, good judgment means knowing when not to act, when to escalate, and when uncertainty matters more than speed. That requires crafting a culture that understands what good judgment looks like and is committed to holding AI accountable to that vision.
AI isn’t designed to drop into your operations with thorough expertise. It’s designed to learn from serving on your team. Some tech experts say it’s best to think of it as an “infinite intern” that can’t be expected to perform well without input from experienced mentors.
Your culture needs to help AI develop good judgment in both a general business sense and in the context of your unique operations. If you commit to that mission, you’ll gain much more from AI adoption.
Your employees need to be able to call out AI’s failures
How does your company handle subpar performance? Do you have a process for reporting it? Do you empower your employees to call it out? Is constructive criticism encouraged in your culture? If not, you may have a hard time keeping AI accountable.
Most employees won’t naturally take it upon themselves to point out problems with AI’s judgment or performance. They’re going to keep their distance from those issues to protect themselves. They also may feel they don’t understand AI well enough to make a valid assessment of whether it is practicing poor judgment.
If you’re going to orchestrate accountability for AI, you’ll need to foster a culture that feels comfortable criticizing it. Your team already knows that AI is their new coworker. Make sure they are good at calling out its bad behavior.
When you invest in AI, you invest in potential. You can’t simply wind it up and let it go. You need to deploy it in a culture that is committed to nurturing it. You’ll get the best results from AI adoption when you first invest in crafting a culture that knows good judgment, watches for it in AI’s performance, and is quick to point out when it is lacking.
AI will embed itself into decision-making, whether leaders prepare for it or not. Culture determines whether it becomes an asset or an ungoverned liability.
Jared Navarre is the founder and CEO of Keyni Consulting, CEO of Onnix, and chairman of the humanitarian NGOs IN-Fire and Project AK-47. He is a systems strategist and operational architect known for solving complex, high-stakes problems across technology, healthcare, infrastructure, and public-sector operations.
With verified top-0.001% WAIS-IV intelligence scores—a clinical measure placing him among the highest-scoring adults ever evaluated—Navarre blends high-cognition modeling with pragmatic execution in his advisory work for Fortune-level enterprises and global institutions. He has designed resilient frameworks for humanitarian networks and guided over 250 organizations through moments of rapid change.
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