The transformation paradox

Meaningful transformation always starts on the inside before it shows up on the outside. That's not a metaphor — it's mechanics. Creating new momentum, or changing its direction entirely, requires internal force first: shifts in mindset, culture, and the systems governing how we work. Only then does it generate the velocity others can see and feel.

This is exactly what businesses are navigating with AI right now. The pressure to show external progress is real and compounding — new products, new efficiencies, new announcements. But that pressure is running headlong into how slow and uncomfortable internal transformation actually is. Doing both simultaneously risks showing the seams around your strategy. That fear, however, cannot be the reason for inaction. At a moment like this, inaction is the worst option available.

The businesses that will start to see meaningful progress in the next 18 months aren't the ones that bought the most AI seats or shipped the most pilots. They're the ones doing the harder, slower, less visible work of transformation at the systems level. That requires three things: building conviction with your workforce, redesigning the operating model, and sharing the lessons in real time.

Build it with your workforce. For any business to make meaningful progress, belief and conviction must take shape from within, starting with employees. They are the guardians of your brand and the builders and evangelists of your product. If the frontline doesn't believe in the premise of what you're doing together — which includes the good, the bad, and the ugly of any innovation moment — it comes through in every customer call, product decision, and purchase experience.

That means trust inside the company is your biggest foundation. The intellectual honesty and pragmatism with which leaders communicate their point of view and a plan can make or break it. There's a playbook for this from the Creator Economy, where brands learned to build with communities who know the product better than anyone and won't be shy about saying what can be better. Many of YouTube’s early employees were creators themselves, and instead of building a wall we invited creators, viewers, and advertisers to sit with us and help build a product that works for all three constituents. It was a hard task but one that ultimately created a flywheel that became a $205 billion marketplace by 2024. The same principle applies internally: invite employees into the process systematically, rather than counting on grassroots behaviors to do the heavy lifting.

Create an operating system. The data this year is sobering. Only 11% of companies have AI agents in production. Enterprise AI maturity scores dropped from 44 to 35 in a single year. 80% of executives report no measurable productivity gains from their AI investments.

The most common response is to double down on the individual: more prompt training, more license seats, more "AI champions" appointed across departments. But productivity is not an individual property. It's a systems one.

AI compounds when it's embedded in how teams actually coordinate — shared templates, redesigned workflows, common handoffs, norms for when to use a tool and when to talk to a human. It stalls when it lives on one person's laptop and goes nowhere when that person is out sick or moves on.

When we first started introducing new model capabilities into some of LinkedIn’s products following the arrival of ChatGPT, our own pace of experimentation and innovation went into a hyper drive. It was exhilarating, with small groups of small and powerful decision makers rolling up their sleeves and operating at a true start-up speed. What suffered initially was the pace of communication and documentation practices, which was still following the logic from a different era. Turning some of the AI tools onto ourselves, we started creating an accountability mechanism that not only drove decision and development processes, but a way to document and communicate those decisions consistently and clearly. It required a systematic change as well as a social buy-in to make sure we could move fast AND scale at the same time.

Experiences like that during the early days of this era of AI taught us that what we're actually doing is a transformation of both the commercial model and the operating model simultaneously — culture, cadence, mindset, measurement, and incentive systems all included. Efficiency and productivity are means to an end. Process improvement is a leading indicator that you might be on the right track. The bigger "so what" is the new value created for employees, customers, and stakeholders — and measuring that requires new frameworks entirely, not just faster versions of the old ones.

Embrace the lessons now, not later. One of the most counterintuitive things about transformation at this scale is that transparency becomes a competitive advantage — not the polished retrospective, but the real-time version. Sharing the lessons as you go, including where the strategy bent, where the pilot failed, and what you did next.

What I learned building Visible is that giving away the playbook as you build is your biggest credibility signal, not a risk to it. Leaders who communicate openly about what's working and what isn't build something that pilots and tooling alone can't: trust. And trust is what turns a workforce into a genuine transformation partner rather than a skeptical audience for your next announcement.

During Visible’s launch and growth period, we encountered many hiccups, as new ventures often do. Our services were disrupted at times, and our e-commerce experience didn’t quite work as intended. For a product with a rigid definition for what’s acceptable or not in its functionality and value, there was little room for mess-ups, and even less time to get it back up and running. Those were recovery moments, and a brand building moment. If our product didn’t manifest the promises we made on the outside, we didn’t just make it right, we acknowledged and explained what was going on, why, and what to expect. During one such incident early days, we invited some of our earliest customers to give us feedback for how else we can make our product better, and more than 800 people gave us insightful, essay-length input. For prepaid phone services, as much as 80% of customers left in a given year for better deals or service. For Visible, it was the other way around, despite no contract or special incentives. They chose us because they wanted to, and many even told us they rooted for us.

No organization has been through a transformation quite like this one. The leaders who will be most useful right now aren't the ones with the cleanest narrative — they're the ones telling the most honest version of it as it unfolds.

The most honest thing about this moment is that nobody has a complete or a proven playbook. Every organization is figuring it out in real time, under pressure, with seams showing. The leaders who will generate the most momentum aren't the ones who hide that. They're the ones who use it, who build with their people, redesign their systems, and tell the story as it unfolds.

Transformation starts inside. The outside follows.