In December 2024, just as the AI hype was ramping up, my colleagues Nicole Radziwill, Todd McClees, and I warned in the Harvard Business Review that most enterprises were poorly positioned to benefit from the technology. Our point was that AI isn’t just a technology story. It’s a human story, and people need to be set up to succeed. 

Today, the evidence is in, and it is not encouraging. Study after study finds that, despite the hype, AI adoption is not having a meaningful impact on productivity. The problem isn’t the technology itself—artificial intelligence will likely be transformative—but the assumption that simply giving employees access to it will achieve much of anything.

The truth is that innovation isn’t about technology, or even ideas. As I wrote in Mapping Innovation, it is about finding novel solutions to important problems. To do that, the people who understand technologies need to learn to collaborate with people who understand real-world problems they can solve. Here’s a quick guide to scaling an idea into meaningful impact.

It’s human nature that, once we get excited about something, we want to tell everyone about it. More than that, we want to convince the skeptics to bring everyone in and get them behind the idea. That’s what happened after OpenAI made ChatGPT available for enterprise integration in March 2023. There was a mad rush by leaders to get everyone in their organization on board. 

But that approach rarely works—and often backfires. Every new idea starts out weak and vulnerable.

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