As companies rush to deploy artificial intelligence, the real bottleneck is not software. It is whether people actually use it, trust it, and change how they work. That is the argument innovation expert Soren Kaplan has been making as organizations discover that buying licenses is not the same as adoption.
Kaplan, a Wall Street Journal author and founder of InnovationPoint, has studied AI rollout across large enterprises.
His conclusion is blunt: most firms are earlier in the journey than their dashboards suggest.
Counting activated accounts or completed training modules gives a false sense of progress.
Real adoption shows up only when tools are embedded in daily workflows, informed by useful data, and supported by new habits.
Few organizations have reached that point. A handful of standouts exist, but they remain exceptions.
The distance between leaders and everyone else is growing. The pattern is consistent.
Teams often score well on access and attitude. Employees can open the tools and many want to learn.
The weak spots are processes, skills, and the ability to feed AI the information it needs.
Without documented workflows and a shared understanding of how work actually gets don...