The AI Shift is Already Taking Shape. Let’s Bring it into Focus.
- gwen sparks
- Feb 17
- 3 min read
The biggest AI gap in most organizations isn’t technical. It’s perceptual.
Something important is already happening inside companies.
Employees are using AI. Not experimentally. Not occasionally. Routinely. They’re drafting with it, analyzing with it, accelerating research, summarizing complexity, and solving real workflow friction. In many cases, they’ve been doing this for months.
Leadership, meanwhile, is still designing the rollout.
This isn’t a failure of oversight. It isn’t a leadership blind spot.
It’s something communicators recognize instantly: the internal picture hasn’t fully sharpened. The shift is happening. The visibility isn’t.
And that matters.
Two Realities, One Organization
McKinsey’s 2025 workplace research quantified what many teams already feel.
C-suite leaders estimated that only 4% of employees were using generative AI for at least 30% of their daily work. Employees reported a number more than three times that. [1]
Only 20% of executives believed employees would reach that level of integration within a year. Nearly half of employees anticipated they already would. [1]
Eighty-nine percent of C-suite leaders reported having a clear AI strategy. Just 57% of employees agreed.
Meanwhile, 92% of companies plan to increase AI investment over the next three years. Only 1% describe their AI deployment as mature. [1]
Adoption is moving. Investment is accelerating. Maturity is lagging.
Not because of resistance. Because of misalignment in what each level can see.
Different Altitude, Different View
Executives operate at strategic altitude. They assess capital allocation, regulatory exposure, competitive positioning, and enterprise risk.
Teams operate at operational altitude. They solve friction, experiment inside workflows, and discover efficiencies in real time.
Both perspectives are valid. Neither is complete alone.
AI adoption moved faster than most internal narratives could keep pace. By the time strategy decks were finalized, informal capability was already forming across departments.
McKinsey’s analysis reinforces the core tension: the barrier to AI maturity isn’t workforce resistance. It’s perception gaps at the leadership level that slow scaling and distort investment timing. [1]
The shift is underway. The clarity is not.
The Unoccupied Function
In most organizations, AI conversations sit with IT, innovation, or operations. They evaluate vendors, build infrastructure, and assess governance.
What they rarely own is internal visibility. That’s communications.
Communicators translate ground-level reality into strategic clarity. We surface patterns across silos. We move insight upward. We help leaders speak with specificity about what is actually happening, not what is aspirational.
AI does not just need infrastructure.
It needs shared understanding.
What Bringing It Into Focus Looks Like
This is not about publishing a celebratory newsletter about AI wins. It’s about building narrative infrastructure that sharpens visibility.
Surface distributed signal. AI breakthroughs often live in isolated teams. Communicators can elevate those signals into executive awareness as usable intelligence.
Reframe informal adoption as capability data. Governance matters. But widespread curiosity and problem-solving are indicators of readiness, not just exposure.
Give leaders language grounded in reality. Executives cannot advocate for what they cannot describe precisely. When leadership language reflects lived usage rather than vendor slides, strategic dialogue improves immediately.
Connect cross-functional patterns early. AI does not land evenly. Marketing may be ahead of legal. Finance may be piloting tools HR has not explored. Communications often sees these shifts before any single department does. That vantage point is strategic.
This Moment Is Transitional
Organizations are operating between experimentation and maturity.
The distance between the 92% increasing spend and the 1% calling themselves mature is where competitive advantage either compounds or dissipates.
That distance is not primarily technological. It is perceptual. Organizations that see themselves clearly allocate better. Scale smarter. Govern proportionately. Organizations operating from blurred visibility build strategy on outdated assumptions.
Why This Matters Now
The AI shift is not coming. It is already taking shape. The question is whether leadership is operating from a wide-angle blur or a focused frame.
Communicators have always reduced distortion between perception and reality. That discipline is not new. The subject is.
The organizations that bring the picture into focus earliest will move with more confidence, less friction, and sharper capital precision.
The gap in AI adoption in organizations is not about willingness.
It’s about visibility.
It’s time to focus.
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