50% of CEOs believe their future depends on how well they integrate AI into their organization (BCG AI Radar 2026). Less than 1% of companies in our country fully utilize AI given today's possibilities (Marek Prokop, May 2026).
Your company bought Copilot or ChatGPT licenses for the team. Management launched an "AI tips..." channel. A few people are experimenting with their own Projects and GPTs. So, "you're using AI." Except, not really.
To discuss this more effectively, we've developed a maturity model valid for 2026.
Six Stages of Maturity
0️⃣ Silent Buzz — management is unaware, people occasionally open unpaid ChatGPT in their browser.
1️⃣ Permission to Experiment — you have purchased licenses and an "AI tips" Slack channel, everyone handles AI on their own. AI is chat.
2️⃣ Personal Assistants and First Automations — everyone has 3–10 custom GPTs, some have an AI node in Make. AI is more sophisticated chat.
3️⃣ Personal Agents — people work with a tool that has an agent layer (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, and others). They have their own skills, MCP/CLI connectors, a second brain. AI does the work, people check the outputs.
4️⃣ Team AI Stack — the team shares skills in Git; team rules for collaboration, directory structure, skill creation, etc., emerge and evolve.
5️⃣ Corporate AI stack — skills and contexts flow across the organization. Sales and marketing share common skills for competitor research or outreach.
The main turning point is between phases 2 and 3. At this point, people's roles shift from specialists to managers. Instead of prompting, you're dealing with creating, assigning tasks to, and controlling agents.
Someone on LinkedIn is always writing that AI isn't working for them. Is that your experience too? You're probably before the chat → agents turning point.
The problem is inertia
Simon Wardley described 16 different forces that hold companies back from adopting new technologies. For AI, 3 are crucial.
1️⃣ The way you conduct research, write reports, lead meetings — everything is built for a world without AI. Until you change your habits, AI won't bring you much.
2️⃣ Your people don't know how to work with AI. Chatting is simple, but moving the entire company to Claude Code in a terminal, starting to share context via GIT, and creating agent skills is less so.
3️⃣ Your company also has years of evidence, that things worked without AI. Why change?
Because Inertia kills companies..
Are you in Phase 1–2? That’s not innovation. That’s inertia. You think you’re “using” AI. Meanwhile, the technology has evolved from prompts and chatting to context engineering and multi-agent orchestration. You’re stuck in inertia.
If you don't address this, the consequences are predictable:
- Talented people will leave. People who taught themselves AI will go where they can work as agent managers — typically to smaller, more agile companies, or freelance.
- Competition will replace you. At some point, you'll realize there's a service on the market 10x cheaper than yours... with similar quality.
- Management will pull AI investments, citing "it's not working." And it really isn't working. The problem isn't with the model. It's with the environment you failed to build for it.
Your company is likely in phase 2. People are experimenting with ChatGPT, some have their own GPT assistants, and marketing occasionally runs workflows in Make. You want to move to phase 3 — where people become agent managers, not tool specialists.
What to do about it? Support the enthusiasts. Lone heroism can be a great start. A senior marketer gets Claude Code and one day a week to build agents in it.
Next week, we're hosting webinar Seven AI Myths You're Paying For. We'll look at AI adoption practically. We'll send the recording to all registrants.
In the fall, we are launching follow-up trainings AI Design Lab and AI Marketing Lab. We will help you build the key competencies people need to transition to phases 3-4 in design and marketing.
"There are 16 different forms of inertia... it's our past success with an existing model of technology that creates inertia to adapting to the new world."
– Simon Wardley
Reading for the weekend
Communication fallacies don't exist. Except in textbooks.
