We are all using the same tools. Companies that win will be the ones willing to trust the people who already understand them.
Here’s a number more people should be talking about: Ninety-five percent of corporate AI projects go nowhere. MIT looked into why, and the answer had nothing to do with the tools being used. It was the companies using them.
I recently had two conversations that explain almost everything about why so many companies are finding it challenging to find success using AI. These two conversations were with people in different industries trying to use the same tools, with wildly polarized outcomes.
The thing that separated them was the size of the companies and everything that comes along with that: layers of bureaucracy, the amount of process for approvals, and the hundred years of history about who gets to make a decision.
The first was a friend who runs UX at a hundred-year-old manufacturer, the kind of place with real factories and a brand your parents would recognize. She’s sharp, and she figured out how to build with AI fast. Unfortunately, her company has not. It only recently even decided digital mattered, and leadership’s entire AI strategy has been to tell everyone to move faster without telling or educating anyone how to do that.
Her product managers are basically opening Claude and building things before anyone’s agreed on what they’re actually building, creating dozens of half-baked products, blooming with no strategy. She’s the head of UX, senior to those PMs, the one person who could point all that energy in the right direction, and she can’t.
She’s stuck waiting on IT to approve access to the same AI tools her team is already using, asking again and again for permissions that never come, while people with a fraction of her judgment ship mediocre products that solve no real problem.
The second conversation was with an engineering lead on a small product team I work with, the kind of team where the founder is still in the room for the calls that matter. We were working out how design gets approved, and on a small team, the default is to let all the stakeholders weigh in and end up with design by committee, which reliably produces the worst version of anything.
To his credit, he shut that idea down before it even started. For the day-to-day, he said, he and the designer would make decisions together and keep moving. Only the genuinely big questions would go to the founder or the full team.
The insight really came when he told the founder his job, at this point, was to be a filter that removes the small stuff, so her attention was saved for the few decisions that actually needed her. Thus removing any need for committee-based decisions.
Both of these companies were approaching their process with the same tools, such as Claude and Cursor. The difference is that one of them is small enough to let a good decision happen with trusted team members, and the other has spent a century building machinery to guarantee that no decision happens without permission.
This makes it look like a big-company problem, and it mostly is, but not entirely. What’s really separating these two companies runs deeper than size: whether the people on top trust the people doing the work enough to get out of their way.
A hundred-year-old manufacturer can choose that as surely as a five-person startup can. Most of them just won’t.