Top leadership experts sound the alarm on the AI doomsday: bosses are choosing tech over people

Imagine someone upstream in your company just deployed an AI agent. Their throughput doubles overnight. Work starts flying to you at twice the speed. But you’re still in Excel. You still don’t have access to the company’s data lake. Overnight, you’ve become the bottleneck — the weak link in a chain that’s suddenly moving faster than ever.

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“This will expose the weakest link in an organization,” said Eric Bradlow, chair of the marketing department and vice chair of AI and analytics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who uses that exact scenario to describe what he fears is coming. “If efficiency gains are happening here but not here,” he said, gesticulating with his hands, “it will be exacerbated and you will see it quickly.”

That bottleneck problem is materializing across corporate America — and the root cause isn’t technology. It’s that companies aren’t doing the hard, unglamorous work of preparing the people who are supposed to be working alongside it.

The 7% problem

The numbers are stark. Across the corporate sector, consultants and analysts see similar, troubling patterns. According to Deloitte’s most recent Tech Trends report (covered by Fortune when it was released), IT accounts for roughly 93% of AI adoption budgets. Only 7% of companies are making meaningful progress designing how humans and AI actually work together.

The deliberate, structural work of figuring out what happens to the people whose jobs are being transformed is an afterthought, said Lara Abrash, chair of Deloitte U.S.. “Ninety-three to seven is not the right level of effort in both places,” she said. “Companies should be spending as much time on the workforce right now as they are on the technology. And we’re seeing most companies focus much more on the technology.”

courtesy of Deloitte

The same imbalance shows up in Wharton’s AI adoption research. Bradlow said Wharton and GBK Collective found in a prior research report what he calls a “donut hole” at the center of most large organizations: the C-suite is investing heavily in AI, younger workers have grown up using it natively, but the middle managers who actually have to orchestrate workflow change are the ones resisting — or being left behind. It was unclear from the data whether this took the form of passive or active resistance.

“You have the C-suite making massive investments in AI,” he said, and “obviously the young people, they’re trained using AI and it typically is the middle, the middle managers where the, if you like, the reluctancy is.”

Why companies keep getting this wrong

The reasons for the imbalance are not mysterious. Technology investments are legible: you can point to a use case, benchmark a result, or show a board a number. Workforce transformation is messier, slower, and harder to quantify.

“It’s a little bit easier to get your hands around what you would need to do with technology,” Abrash said. “It’s a lot harder to deal with the workforce.” This isn’t just an “AI-specific thing,” she added, noting, for example, how companies have grown fond of reorganizations, seemingly for their own sake, and managers looking at various mechanisms to cut headcount instead of doing the hard work of optimizing their workforce. “This behavior is not because of AI. It’s just the way it generally is.”

Linda Hill, a professor at Harvard Business School and head faculty chair of its Leadership Initiative, put it in a broader leadership context in a recent conversation with Fortune. In her new book Genius at Scale, co-authored with Jason Wild and Emily Tedards, she argued that the entire model of what makes a great leader is shifting — and many executives are still operating on the old playbook.

“Traditional leadership has been: be decisive, stick out the chest, show confidence. This is the destination. Get in the car and follow me, it’ll be okay,” said Wild, a 25-year innovation veteran who led teams at Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce. The problem with that approach now, he added, is that “the world is literally shifting underneath our feet by three or four feet every week.”

Jason Wild.courtesy of Jason Wild

Hill and Wild call the new required skill “wayfinding” — a deliberate contrast to the old chest-sticking-out method of “pathfinding.” Pathfinders set a destination and drive toward it. Wayfinders navigate fog. It’s suddenly an era, Hill added, when org chart whispers include “I don’t even know what team I’m going to need in a year, let alone three,” arguing that the wayfinder way of leadership will matter enormously. Hill explained it this way: pathfinding isn’t an inherently old-fashioned way of leading, but it is one orientated around a clear destination in sight; we aren’t in that kind of circumstance now. The destination is ahead of us, but it’s unclear.

“When we finally realized what we were studying was wayfinding and not pathfinding,” Hill said, “we also realized how emotionally and intellectually challenging innovati