Buying isn't deciding

Everyone wants AI now. The board, the owners, the analysts — and increasingly the people themselves, asking when they'll get access too.

So the fastest, most visible move wins: give everyone a licence. Every seat, every desk. Then the costs run ahead of any return anyone can point to, and the next reach is predictable — cut the budget.

Same tools don't produce the same outcome, though. In one large survey of around 1,150 employees late last year, where leadership had explained the AI strategy clearly, 92 percent reported a positive effect on their work. Where it stayed unclear, only 62 percent.

Thirty points. Identical technology. The gap is a sentence that was said — or wasn't.

Handing everyone a tool is a purchase. It isn't a decision. And it doesn't matter whether you buy a chatbot for every desk or wire it into every workflow — both are things you bought. Neither is anyone standing up and saying what it's for: which work, which value, for whom. That sentence costs nothing — and it's the one that gets skipped, because the pressure asks "did you roll it out?", not "did anyone explain why?"

One thing to try this week: ask three people who don't report to you why your organisation is doing this. Three different answers, and the decision was never made — only announced.

The cost spiral isn't a budget problem. It's what a skipped decision looks like on an invoice.

💬 What was the one sentence that finally made a change make sense to you — and who said it?

You paid to remove the technical excuse. What's left is the part only you can do.