I’ve been doing a handful of talks lately, mostly with leadership teams, on AI, experience, and where all of this is heading. Nothing overly technical, just helping teams make sense of what’s actually happening versus what it feels like is happening. One thing that keeps coming up in almost every session is this quiet sense that organizations feel like they’re behind. It’s not usually said outright, but you can feel it. Leaders will mention that they’ve rolled out Copilot or ChatGPT internally, maybe share a couple of productivity wins, and then there’s this moment where everyone kind of looks around and wonders if that’s enough.
Most of that pressure is coming from outside the organization, not from anything happening inside it.
AI billboards at the airport. LinkedIn overrun with people who became an AI Expert sometime last year. “Agents” and “automation” dropped into meetings like everyone already knows what they mean. It creates a distorted baseline. Organizations measure themselves against vendor marketing and best-case press coverage and conclude they’re falling behind a race that, in most cases, nobody around them is actually winning either.
Where most organizations actually land
Most organizations are sitting at Levels 1 or 2 without realizing it, and knowing where you actually stand is more useful than whatever picture you’ve borrowed from a conference keynote.
Level 1: Assist
This is personal productivity. People use AI to write, summarize, and clean things up. It saves time and cuts repetitive work, but it’s still individual. AI is helping you do your job a bit faster.
Level 2: Enhance
At this level, AI starts improving how people think, not just how quickly they work. Synthesizing research, comparing options, pressure-testing ideas. For people in strategy, research, or analysis, this is a real shift. Less about speed, more about arriving at better answers.
Level 3: Augment
This is where things get more interesting. is where things get less common and more interesting. AI starts giving people capabilities they didn’t have before. Being able to mock up an interface or visualize a concept in Figma AI without pulling in a designer changes what you can express, and when. This is happening more than most organizations realize, but usually one person at a time rather than by design.
Level 4: Automate
This is where AI starts to affect systems. Workflows rethought end-to-end, tasks handled with less human involvement at every step. This is what most organizations say they’re aiming for. It’s also the hardest to actually do, and where it exists, it usually required more groundwork than the announcement suggested.
The progress is there. It’s just not visible.
Meaningful work is already happening in most organizations. It’s just not being seen. Someone in marketing who’s changed how they approach a whole content workstream. A developer who’s stopped solving a certain class of problems the old way. An analyst whose thinking has shifted in ways their manager hasn’t quite caught up to yet. These aren’t edge cases. They’re common. They just don’t get shared.
The problem most organizations actually have isn’t that they’re behind. It’s that they don’t have a clear picture of where they are, so they can’t see how far they’ve come, and they’re making decisions about where to go next without much to stand on.
The most useful thing you can do right now isn’t a strategy offsite or a new tool rollout. It’s a single conversation. Get the right people in a room and ask where AI is already showing up in their work. What they’re using, what’s changed, what’s saving them time or changing how they think. Map it against the levels.
You’ll almost certainly find more than you expected, and you’ll have an actual picture of where you are instead of one borrowed from a LinkedIn feed. That’s worth more than most AI strategies currently sitting in a shared drive somewhere.
So this may not answer the big questions around the global impacts of AI in society, but I’m hoping this can be an easy starting point for some organizations who feel they need to kickstart something before it’s too late.
