We didn’t set out to build an AI Leadership programme. We set out to run a roundtable.
Then we ran another one. And another. And in room after room, across sectors that don’t normally compare notes, the same gap kept surfacing.
At our AI & Data Leadership Forum in Belfast this summer, a RegTech product leader opened his keynote with a McKinsey figure that stopped the room: 88% of firms now report using AI. Fewer than 6% can demonstrate it’s adding measurable value.
Nine months earlier, at a separate forum in Edinburgh, a Chief Data & AI Officer opened with a different statistic that landed the same way: 95% of GenAI pilots fail — not because the models don’t work, but because organisations haven’t decided what kind of leadership it takes to make them work.
BCG’s own research, cited in that session, found fewer than one in five organisations have embedded AI leadership at scale. Most are stuck in what the report calls a “permanent pilot” – activity without alignment.
Different cities, different industries, different speakers who’d never met each other. Same diagnosis, twice: the constraint isn’t the technology. It’s whether the organisation underneath it – its purpose, its people, its ability to actually work together – is ready to carry the weight of what’s being asked of it.
That’s the gap that businesses must close.
Over the past year, across our Forums and roundtables, four versions of the same story kept repeating:
Leaders assume alignment instead of measuring it. Purpose and values live in conversation, not in anything documented or tested – and AI is now the thing forcing that ambiguity into the open.
People can’t see their own progress, and neither can their managers. Development happens on manager memory and annual reviews, not evidence, at exactly the moment organisations most need to know who they’re at risk of losing.
Cross-team and cross-partner initiatives lose momentum quietly. Success gets defined loosely at kick-off, everyone assumes cultural fit, and by the time friction shows up as delay, nobody can name where it started.
AI adoption is being planned against job descriptions, not against where work actually happens. Opportunities get chased opportunistically instead of ranked by value and readiness, and effort drifts.
None of these are new problems. What’s new is that AI has no patience for them. It doesn’t wait for the annual survey. It exposes the gap between what leaders intend and what the organisation actually does, in real time, whether anyone’s measuring it or not.
Every organisation in our ecosystem is being asked the same question from a different angle: not “are you using AI,” but “can you prove your organisation is ready to lead through what AI is changing?” Boards are asking it. Regulators are asking it. Increasingly, customers and employees are asking it too.
Most organisations genuinely don’t know the answer. Not because they haven’t thought about it, but because purpose, alignment, culture, capability and collaboration are exactly the things disruption tests first – and exactly the things least likely to have ever been measured.
How are we responding?
Leading through Disruption – a capability-building response to that gap, built around four pillars that map directly onto what we keep hearing: AI Leadership, Talent & Retention, Enabling Technology Teams, and AI Workforce Transformation.
Each one starts from a diagnostic, not a pitch – because you can’t close a gap you haven’t measured, and most organisations and ecosystems are currently guessing.
We’ve built a free, 15-minute diagnostic that gives you an instant read across all four areas – not a sales call, just a clear picture of where the gaps are and who owns closing them.
Start the diagnostic, developed alongside our partners SolasOS here: solas-os.ai/readiness
Over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more insights on what we’re seeing pillar by pillar – starting next with the one that keeps coming up in every room: leadership.
This programme draws on insight from FinTech-Tables leadership Forums, alongside wider research from BCG, McKinsey and Gallup.
