AI Will Sink Most Companies (I’m Not Talking About Artificial Intelligence)

While the world races to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), most companies face a far more dangerous threat: A.I.—Arrogance and Ignorance.

Yes, artificial intelligence is transformative. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has called it “more profound than fire or electricity.” But simply adopting AI won’t guarantee success. The true test lies in how leaders position their companies in this rapidly evolving landscape. And the biggest barriers to doing so? Arrogance and ignorance.

Key Facts:

• The average Fortune 1000 CEO is 59 years old.

• The average public company board director is 62.

• Many of today’s leaders rose during the IPOs of Amazon, Google, and Facebook—and now believe they’ve “seen this movie before.”

  
  

AI isn’t another dot-com moment or tech wave to ride out. It’s a foundational shift that reinvents how companies operate, serve customers, and compete. The inability—or unwillingness—of executives and boards to grasp this reality could spell disaster within the next decade.

Arrogance: “We’ve Seen This Before”

For three decades, American companies have thrived despite crises like the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial meltdown and a global pandemic. Such resilience has bred a kind of strategic muscle memory—an instinct to stay the course, protect the balance sheet, and manage through disruption.

In the AI era, that once laudable instinct is a dangerous complacency. The cost of inaction is no longer measured in missed opportunities, but in existential risk. Survival now depends on reinvention, speed to market, and a willingness to disrupt traditional models.

While some companies are incapable of this adaptation, many are simply unwilling. This arrogance shows up as:

• Pattern Projection: Treating AI like another IT trend and delegating it to the IT organization, while these new agentic systems are transforming each and every part of the organization.

• Brand Bravado: Believing brand equity and customer loyalty will protect against disruption. In reality, new brands will capture customers through AI-native interfaces and capabilities.

• Vendor Abdication: Outsourcing AI strategy and expertise; this is the equivalent of outsourcing your core business competencies and differentiation.

• PR Over P&L: Promoting AI-laced marketing campaigns instead of reinventing pricing, packaging, and processes that drive financial returns.

  
  

AI is reordering markets through agentic orchestration—the automated coordination of tools, data, and actions by AI agents. Every company must pick its place in this new architecture. If you treat this like a familiar tech wave, you are positioning your enterprise for failure.

Ignorance: A Critical Knowledge Gap

No board would accept a director who can’t read a balance sheet, calculate EBITDA, or dissect an earnings report. Yet most board members lack even foundational fluency in AI. Few could differentiate a GPU from a CPU—or understand what RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) means compared to reinforcement learning. It’s not about coding. It’s about comprehension—a requirement to discern real capability from hype, to spot execution risks, and to steer strategy intelligently.

Without this foundational knowledge, boards cannot:

• Assess technological feasibility.

• Evaluate vendor or management proposals.

• Provide strategic vision.

  
  

Every company—whether a professional service firm, technology company, or manufacturer—must decide its position in the agentic stack. This isn’t a tech choice; it’s a business model decision that defines your economics and operational leverage.

For most service and technology companies, which represent 80% of U.S. GDP, a decision must be made as to whether or not you are a:

• Primary Orchestrator: You coordinate agents, tools, and data across multiple domains.

• Domain Orchestrator: You specialize in a sector (e.g., claims processing or sales enablement), coordinating tools and agents with proprietary workflows and vertical expertise.

• Tool Provider: You deliver a specific, high-value capability (e.g., data retrieval, financial analysis) with clear API utility and cost/performance leadership.

  
  

The internet never threatened the existence of law firms or banks. AI does. It collapses complex workflows into automated, intelligent processes. Organizational survival depends on picking your position—and aligning go-to-market, product, and monetization around it.

Board-Level Action Plan

To avoid being sunk by AI (Arrogance & Ignorance), boards must act decisively:

1. Declare a Strategy: Choose your strategic position—Primary Orchestrator, Domain Orchestrator, or Tool—and build the requisite systems and business model to support this decision.

2. Appoint Single-Threaded Ownership: Make a team or executive accountable for the integration of artificial intelligence throughout the organization.

3. Fund Initiatives Based on Proof: Allocate resources tied to measurable outcomes like growth, cost efficiency and productivity —not vague promises.

4. Upgrade Literacy—Fast: Executives don’t need to code, but must understand core AI technologies and concept in order to challenge claims and guide strategy.

   
   

Final Word

AI is not just another innovation cycle. It is a rewiring of how value is created, delivered, and captured across the global economy. The organizations that thrive will be those led by boards and executives who can shed the comfort of past success and confront this new reality with clarity and courage.

Overcoming arrogance requires humility—a willingness to question assumptions, revisit proven models, and move faster than instinct may allow. Overcoming ignorance demands curiosity—a drive to learn the foundations of the AI stack, understand where risk and opportunity reside, and develop fluency in how systems, models, and data interact.

Fix both, and A.I. -- the technology becomes your greatest advantage. Leave them untouched, and A.I.—the mindset will sink you.