IBM's reporting lands on the number boards are now asking about: fewer than one in ten companies capture meaningful AI value at scale, a figure three independent studies (BCG, McKinsey, MIT) converge on. The cause, the executives interviewed agree, isn't the technology. It's leadership. Siloed ownership across the C-suite leaves no single person accountable for turning investment into returns, and initiatives stall in the space between strategy and execution.
Our founder Jeremy Korst is quoted throughout, including the line we keep coming back to: the gap isn't primarily a technology problem, it's a translation problem, and investment is flowing faster than the organization can absorb it. The piece also surfaces the "messy middle" from his Wharton/GBK study: 45 percent of senior executives report significant AI returns, against 27 percent of the middle managers actually running the programs.
IBM's own consultants land in the same place: scattered pilots become "random acts of proof" until a named owner carries a real P&L number. That's the Flywheel thesis in someone else's words. The Core, people and org design, is where the value is won or lost.
So what: If no single executive owns the P&L for your AI work, that isn't a gap to patch later. It's the thing quietly draining the returns.