Companies might be investing more in artificial intelligence than ever before, but the scale of their investment does not guarantee meaningful results. Goldman Sachs Research says global AI investment could exceed $1 trillion in 2026, roughly $581 billion of that in the United States. Yet Gartner says that by the end of 2025, at least 50 percent of generative AI projects had been abandoned after proof of concept.
We have never had more technology, more investment, or more strategic attention directed toward AI transformation, but that can all be wasted when there's a lack of organizational alignment within the project. The problem is not necessarily that leaders have chosen the wrong technology or failed to establish a strategy. In many organizations I have worked with, the strategy is clear.
The investment has been approved. The transformation has been announced. People have agreed to move forward.
But agreement is not the same as commitment, and consensus is not the same as alignment. When leaders mistake tacit agreement by a workforce for genuine ownership of the new technology, organizations can appear to be moving forward while they are quietly losing the conditions required to execute the transformation. That distinction matters even more as companies restructure around efficiency and AI adoption. has reported workforce reductions at several major U.S. companies as organizations streamline operations amid technological change.
Teams are asked to do more with different resources. Yet through all of that disruption, execution still depends on people understanding what is changing, why it matters, and what they personally own. The human dimension of transformation may be easy to overlook because it can be harder to measure than technology spending or organizational charts.
A 2026 systematic literature review in Management Review Quarterly examined 50 empirical studies on “quiet quitting,” which suggests something leaders should already understand. Workplace conditions, relationships, expectations, and management behavior influence how people engage with the organizations they are being asked to transform. I have seen leaders spend enormous amounts of time determining where an organization needs to go while spending far less time examining what will actually cause people to move in that direction.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
