This product has already been purchased.
- AI is moving faster than organisations can translate into meaningful economic impact, creating a growing gap between the tech’s capability and organisational execution.
- Governance and planning cycles are increasingly outpaced by technology.
- The AI transformation requires leaders to use the tools themselves, flatten organisational rigidity and move faster than traditional structures allow.
Boards are accelerating investment in artificial intelligence, but many remain frustrated by the lack of measurable returns. Tech leaders believe the bottleneck is cultural, not technical, pointing out that traditional corporate hierarchies are simply too rigid to absorb the shift.
At CommBank’s Accelerate AI event, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, admitted the question he gets most often from CEOs is: “Where is the revenue?”
“There’s a lot of great things I hear from companies. The negative one is ‘our spending is going up and up, people feel like they’re being very productive… but where is the revenue, where are the actual productivity gains?’”
His answer: “It’s all still very new, and it’s just going to take a little bit longer to figure out how a company actually does run more efficiently. If a year from now, we’re still talking about that same question, I’d be more concerned.”
Altman’s view is that it’s not that AI is failing, rather, it’s moving faster than organisations can translate into meaningful economic impact. In other words, capability is ahead of adoption, and adoption is ahead of monetisation.
He said the technology is already capable of producing outcomes once thought to require novel scientific and mathematical insight.
“The technology is now so amazing to me,” he said. “We have these incredibly smart models”.
Yet even the man behind ChatGPT admits he doesn’t use AI “enough”.
“Last week, we had a system that was given a very hard math problem that had stumped our best mathematicians for many decades. Then it went off and the summarised version of what it did was 150 pages long... Yet, when I look at what I do, even in my own workflow, I still know I should be using so much more AI than I am,” said Altman.
What is occupying his thinking more than the technology itself is “what it’s going to take to integrate this into people’s lives and into our companies so we get the acceleration we deserve”.
He believes AI will soon become a “persistent, always running system” – operating 24 hours a day, continuously offering assistance.
“It is understanding you and your goals, and your company and that company’s goals. It’s just trying to be as helpful as it can given the amount of computing resources it has available”.
AI to free people up, not replace them
What we deserve, according to Altman, is the ability to focus on the work we’re “uniquely good at and enjoy”.
"We really do care about our interactions with people,” he said.
The CEO, who once suggested AI would likely replace most jobs, has since revised his views. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” he told attendees.
“My intuitions were just off.”
But while AI has not replaced human labour, Altman repeatedly returned to a broader concern – it is not yet behaving like a conventional productivity technology.
“We’re in the middle of this figuring-it-all-out phase, but we haven’t yet figured out how we’ll have a world where people and AI collaborate together,” he said.
Although confident we will resolve this, he noted the tension created by AI’s pace of change versus corporate governance cycles.
“How can I run a company on an annual or quarterly planning cycle when the whole world is changing every month or every two months or less?” he asked.
The challenge extends beyond business into areas such as medicine, said Altman, where scientific discovery is accelerating faster than bureaucracy can adapt.
Ultimately, he believes the very nature of doing business will change to match the speed of technological development.
The organisations that will pull ahead will be those that don’t wait for perfect certainty before acting, instead embracing controlled experimentation and rapid iteration.
“This is the thing I’ve observed the best companies do. Rather than trying to rigidly set every possible policy, they allow a small amount of adoption,” he said.
Leadership capability is now a binding constraint
But putting Altman’s theory into practice is messy, even for tech giants. Despite its digital pedigree, Canva couldn't just bolt AI onto its existing structure, it had to completely reinvent itself.
Also speaking to more than 800 CBA clients at CommBank Accelerate AI, Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht said incremental AI adoption was never going to be enough, given the nature of the business.
About four years ago, he recalled, Canva realised “if we weren’t going to disrupt ourselves, we were going to be disrupted”. The company then began “overinvesting” in the emerging technology.
Since then, it has shifted from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools.
Having lived through a transformation many businesses are only now beginning to face, Obrecht said AI adoption is often constrained more by leadership behaviour than by technology.
“I don’t think you can lead AI change without going headfirst yourself as a leader,” he said. “If you don’t deeply know and use the product and are at the forefront of these AI products and their capabilities, you’ll never hire your way out of driving a successful AI strategy.”
His advice: “You need to lead by example. If you’re not that way inclined, you need to hire someone who is – and place a lot of trust in them.
“Innovation comes with mistakes and a lot of experimentation… Every conversation I have with AI, I assume I know the least and I’m there to learn,” he added.
At Canva, Obrecht and the leadership team put employees through a period of structured and unstructured learning, giving them multiple pathways to engage with the technology.
Elevate goals above planning
Like Altman, Obrecht believes businesses remain constrained by outdated planning cycles.
Given the pace of technological change, Canva now avoids planning more than two weeks ahead.
Businesses, he said, must become “a bit more nimble in this AI world”. That also requires confronting rigid organisational structures and entrenched leadership hierarchies.
“You generally create an organisational structure in order to achieve a set of goals. But goals evolve every one or two years, but those organisational structures you set up endure.
“What that means then is, a couple of years later, you’ve still got these organisational structures, but you’ve got a new set of goals. So in order to achieve the goals, you’re fighting your organisational structure. But it’s very hard to smash apart your organisational structure because there’s a bunch of people with egos.”
His advice is to “elevate the goals above the organisational structure” before mobilising squads against those goals.
“Then you need to let that front run and essentially be the pilot for a new organisational structure you’re going to evolve into,” said Obrecht.
Finally, he told directors to “stop fighting gravity”.
“This technology is here, it’s coming, and we need to harness it for good.”
Latest news
Already a member?
Login to view this content