The biggest mistake I see enterprises making with AI is underestimating it.
I've been in this industry long enough to see the major transformations firsthand. Mainframe to distributed computing. The shift to cloud. The rise of the web. AI is as close to the experience of getting on the internet for the first time as anything I've encountered in my career. Yet too many companies are treating it like a minor upgrade rather than the fundamental shift it actually is.
The Incrementalism Trap
Here's the mistake I see leadership teams making: they're approaching AI as incremental to their business. A little automation here, a chatbot there. The thinking goes, "We'll layer it in gradually and see what happens."
I understand the appeal. The Gartner hype cycle has trained us to be skeptical, and there's plenty of messaging out there suggesting a cautious approach is the smart play. But based on what we're seeing in practical application and real-world usage, that thinking is dangerously off the mark.
Companies that fail to see AI as transformative are going to find themselves on the wrong side of a stampede.
What Transformation Actually Looks Like
Let me give you a concrete example. With clean, normalized supply chain data and AI working together, you can already ask complex questions through a standard BI tool. Questions like: How much did I spend with FedEx last year? How much of that was freight versus accessorial charges versus tariffs?
That sounds simple, but it's actually incredibly complex. Companies like FedEx are made up of multiple business units, and you're likely doing business with several of them. Breaking that down used to require an army of analysts. Now you have a bot working 24/7, analyzing data and surfacing insights you never would have found on your own.
We've already seen this in action. In one case, AI analysis identified roughly $10 million in annual costs coming from a single distribution center. Costs that nobody knew existed or understood the cause of.
The Cultural Challenge No One Wants to Address
Here's the piece that most leaders skip over: you can't adopt AI effectively without addressing the fear it creates in your organization.
I joke about this with my kids. I have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old, and the world is constantly telling them AI is going to fundamentally change their lives. They hear the dark version where it takes all the jobs, and they hear the optimistic version about abundance and possibility. The reality will land somewhere in the middle.
But here's what I've learned: if you don't look that fear in the eye and address it directly with your team, you're going to face resistance that slows everything down.
I read about a CEO recently who overhauled 80% of his entire company because employees didn't believe in AI. That's an aggressive move, but it underlines a critical point. Whether you embrace AI or not, it's going to be disruptive. You may as well embrace it.
A Different Approach to the Fear Problem
At our company, we've taken a specific stance on this. If someone comes up with a way for AI to eliminate their own role, we'll invest in retraining them. We'll send them and their entire team to learn a technical skill we actually need.
Think about what that does to the incentive structure. Instead of hiding from automation, people start looking for ways to automate themselves because doing so becomes a path to career advancement rather than job loss.
I genuinely believe AI unlocks human potential. It frees people up to do more interesting work. But you only get there if you confront the anxiety head-on instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
The Stakes Are Higher Than You Think
We haven't overhauled 80% of our staff, but we have added significant talent to the company. People who believe in what AI can do and are eager to push it forward. That's a deliberate choice. We're not assuming this is incremental, and I don't think anyone else should either.
The companies that treat AI as a stampede to be harnessed rather than a gentle wave to ride will be the ones that win. We're seeing massive productivity gains and insights surfacing from normalized data that simply weren't possible before. This is a fundamental reshaping of how supply chains operate.
The Path Forward for Supply Chain Leaders
If you're a supply chain leader still weighing a cautious approach, I'd encourage you to reassess. The risk of moving too slowly is starting to outweigh the risk of moving too fast.
AI is going to be disruptive regardless of your posture toward it. The question is whether you'll be positioned to capture the value or spend the next several years catching up to competitors who moved while you waited.
Look the fear in the eye. Invest in your people. Stop treating the most significant technological shift of our lifetimes like it's just another software upgrade.