By Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

The era of corporate AI theater is ending. A recent Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective study finds that 82% of enterprise leaders use generative AI at least weekly and 46% use it daily. That is no longer experimentation.

Yet McKinsey’s 2025 state of AI survey shows a stubborn gap between broad usage and real scale, with many companies still stuck in pilots and isolated use cases. The next corporate divide will not be between firms that “have AI” and firms that do not. It will be between firms that wire AI into workflows, incentives, and management routines and firms that keep mistaking access for transformation.

Mainstreaming Was the Easy Part

The report’s most revealing finding is not that executives use AI often. It is where they use it: data analysis, summarization, document creation, and research. Those are high-frequency, repeatable tasks with clear handoffs, which is exactly where the economics of AI are strongest.

Research published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that a generative AI assistant raised customer support productivity by 15% on average, with far larger gains for less experienced workers. Meanwhile, Stanford’s 2025 AI Index captures the broader backdrop of fast-improving model capability and expanding economic impact. The lesson for leaders is simple: the first wave of value comes from narrowing work, not mythologizing it.

That is why adoption gaps now look less like a technology problem and more like a management problem. The Wharton findings show that IT and procurement lead while sales, marketing, and operations still trail.

Teams move faster when they have clear permissions, usable data, and managers who can define acceptable risk. They stall when every prompt feels like a policy exception. The companies pulling ahead are not the ones with the loudest AI narrative. They are the ones making AI boring enough to become routine.

ROI Has Replaced FOMO

The healthiest number in the study may be 72%: the share of leaders formally measuring AI ROI. Two years ago, boardrooms rewarded enthusiasm. Now they are asking which workflows move, which costs fall, and which revenue lines improve.

That shift mirrors McKinsey’s research on organizations rewiring to capture AI value and lines up with PwC’s 2025 AI Jobs Barometer, which found that industries best positioned to use AI are seeing much faster productivity and revenue-per-employee growth.

This is also why internal R&D deserves more scrutiny than applause. Custom tools can create durable advantages when they target a real bottleneck, a proprietary dataset, or a regulated process. They destroy value when they become executive vanity projects. The winners in 2026 will not be the firms with the most copilots or the most agent talk. They will be the ones that can show faster cycle times, better decisions, fewer errors, and cleaner unit economics.

AI has entered its spreadsheet era, and that is good news.

Talent Is Now the Constraint

If usage is mainstream and ROI is measurable, why are so many companies still underperforming? Because people now set the ceiling.

The Wharton study shows stronger C-suite ownership and tighter guardrails, yet it also finds slipping confidence in training and persistent concern about skill erosion. That tension is exactly what NIST’s Generative AI Profile was built to address: scaling AI safely requires governance that lives inside daily operations, not a compliance memo bolted on at the end.

The labor market is sending the same signal. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies AI and big-data capabilities among the fastest-growing skill demands of the next decade, while an OECD brief on the AI skills gap warns that training supply may not be enough even for broad AI literacy.

At the same time, PwC reports that workers with AI skills command a substantial wage premium. Companies that cut training while complaining about talent scarcity are effectively bidding against themselves. They will pay more for outside talent while getting less from the people they already employ.

Conclusion

Enterprise AI has entered a more serious phase. The novelty is fading, the budgets are real, and the excuses are running out. What matters now is disciplined workflow design, management accountability, and workforce capability.

The firms that win the next round will treat AI as a system of work, not a collection of tools. Everyone else will keep buying intelligence without ever quite learning how to use it.

About the Author

By Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

If anyone wants a clean example of how governments waste taxpayer money, Vermont just handed them one. Gov. Phil Scott’s return-to-office order was sold as a common-sense push for collaboration and better service. It has instead become a case study in how political theater can collide with labor law, management reality, and basic fiscal discipline. On April 1, the Vermont Labor Relations Board ruled that the administration unlawfully imposed its hybrid work standard without bargaining in good faith with the union. That should have been the end of the illusion. This was never a careful efficiency reform. It was an expensive gamble taken on the public’s dime.

What makes the fiasco especially foolish is that the state was not improvising in a legal vacuum. Telework in Vermont government was already an established working condition, not a perk handed out on a whim. In testimony to lawmakers in 2023, the state’s own human resources leadership described Telework Policy 11.9 as effective since 2012. The current VSEA contracts remain in force through June 30, 2026. And Vermont law is not coy about the employer’s obligations: 3 V.S.A. § 961 makes it an unfair labor practice to refuse to bargain collectively. Even if the administration believed it had broad managerial authority, it was walking straight into a legal dispute over a subject that plainly touched terms and conditions of employment.

That matters because this was not some marginal workplace tweak. The order affected roughly 3,000 state employees, many of whom had arranged their lives around remote or hybrid work that the state had allowed for years. The administration’s own 2023 presentation said about 3,100 telework agreements were already approved, with 44 percent of employees teleworking and an average remote schedule of 28 hours per week. This was a mature operating model. The state had data, experience, and an existing framework. Yet instead of bargaining over how to refine telework, officials chose a unilateral order that treated a long-settled arrangement like a management toy they could snap back into shape whenever they felt like it.

The result was predictable. When leaders ignore the rules, taxpayers do not get strength. They get liability. The labor board’s ruling means the state may have to unwind the policy, restore previous arrangements, and make workers whole for losses tied to the unlawful change. Even Scott himself acknowledged the danger, saying taxpayers could be on the hook for commuting, child care, and other costs associated with returning to the office. Think about how absurd that is. The administration forced employees back in, lost the legal fight, and now may have to reimburse the very costs it created. That is not a firm hand at the wheel. That is a taxpayer-funded loop of self-inflicted expense.

And the meter does not stop there. To support the mandate, the administration also committed the state to more office space in Waterbury. In November, VTDigger reported that the state had signed leases for an additional 22,000 square feet of privately owned office space, costing about $430,000 in the first year and roughly $2.3 million over five years. That spending was justified by the same return-to-office order the labor board has now found unlawful. So Vermont taxpayers may be stuck with a double burden: paying employees back for the costs of commuting to offices they did not need to be in, while also paying for office space the state may not need to keep.

This is exactly the kind of trap governments should be trying to avoid in a tight-budget environment. The Government Accountability Office has warned that underused office buildings carry recurring operating costs and that hybrid work creates a powerful reason for public employers to rethink, not expand, their footprints. Vermont’s mistake was to do the opposite. Rather than use the rise of telework to shrink fixed overhead, the state appears to have used a political crusade against remote work to justify new overhead. That is the fiscal logic of a teenager with a credit card.

The managerial case for the order was never especially convincing either. The state’s own employee engagement data, summarized in that same 2023 HR presentation, showed that telework or hybrid schedules ranked among the top reasons employees stayed and among the top reasons they might leave. Outside Vermont, the evidence has moved in the same direction. A large Stanford-led study found that workers on hybrid schedules were just as productive and just as likely to be promoted as those in the office full time, while resignations fell sharply. A serious administration would have used that evidence to bargain for targeted in-person requirements where they were truly needed. It would have matched office presence to mission, not to ideology.

Instead, Vermont got a one-size-fits-all order, a legal defeat, potential restitution, and new real estate obligations. That is not efficiency. It is performative management that leaves the public paying for the performance. The lesson here is bigger than one governor or one labor board ruling. When politicians try to make a cultural statement through the machinery of government, they often end up turning symbolic toughness into very real waste. Vermont taxpayers deserve a government that bargains before it dictates, measures before it leases, and solves problems before it creates bills. On this one, the Scott administration did the opposite in exactly the wrong order.

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