- Robert Glasser: “Are people using AI, or is the organization learning from it? What changed because we spent those tokens? And who moves discoveries from individuals to teams to organizational capabilities? Ethan Mollick has been writing about AI adoption in organizations for a while now. In Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd, he makes the point that individual productivity gains from AI do not automatically become organizational gains. People may get faster, write better, analyze more, automate more, or quietly become cyborg versions of themselves. The company may still learn almost nothing. A lot of companies are now entering the phase where GitHub Copilot licenses are provisioned, ChatGPT Enterprise exists somewhere in the stack, Claude or Gemini or Cursor show up in pockets, and every team has at least one person who is much further along than the official enablement material assumes. Some of this is visible, yet much of it is not. Management sees license usage (“Where is the ROI for the 2 mio € we paid Anthropic last year?”), maybe prompt counts, maybe a survey, maybe a few internal PoCs that feel encouraging enough to put into a steering committee deck. In other companies, AI went straight to IT and died. I think everyone knows this is the phase where it gets complicated, like, really complicated. The “messy middle” of AI adoption starts when AI use is everywhere, uneven, partially hidden, difficult to compare, and not yet connected to organizational learning…”
- See also Bloomberg Gift Article – When the Pope Says AI Isn’t Infallible. As an indicator of confidence, Leo’s view is too big to ignore. The mere fact that Pope Leo XIV chose to publish a 40,000-word essay this week arguing that artificial intelligence must “serve humanity, not concentrate power,” shows that the issue has grown salient in society, and signals an approaching turning point. The Roman Catholic Church isn’t known for its adaptability, but when it attempts to reform, its timing is spectacular. The Vatican II council is a glorious example. Called by Pope John XXIII in 1959, a time of stable prosperity, it marked the beginning of a period of convulsive change. Its first session, starting in October 1962, overlapped with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The second, amid Beatlemania, was interrupted by the Kennedy assassination. By its close in 1965, under Paul VI, the revolutionary 1960s were well underway. Somehow, John had spotted the turning point coming. The church attempts to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Its timing might be driven by the priorities of an omniscient God. But it’s not necessary to invoke the supernatural. For all its faults, the church has maintained its scale and role by operating as a uniquely powerful gauge of opinion. Priests act as agents throughout the population, gain an intimate understanding of their parishioners and communities, and feed their views into a hierarchy that ends with the pope. Papal encyclicals, the conclusion of the process, respond to society’s greatest concerns. Everyone should heed Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence).
- See also The Atlantic Gift Article – Why Everyone Hates AI Data Centers. The left-right coalition forming against AI
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