Co-op CEO Shares Linchpin to AI Adoption

Jack Welch put it plainly: “When the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.” That line has been rattling around in my head for months, and the more I work on artificial intelligence (AI) adoption at our cooperative, the more I think it captures exactly where most organizations and most individuals now sit.

There are three layers to what is happening and they are moving at very different speeds.

The toolset is sprinting. Every two weeks something materially better ships. Reasoning models that were science projects a year ago now draft board memos, reconcile financial scenarios and run cross-system agents that touch real production data. Robotics is following the same curve, just trailing by 18 months or so. If you stopped paying attention in January, you are already behind in May.

The skillset is walking. Humans learn at human speed. We need reps, feedback and time to build intuition for what these tools do well, where they fail and how to design work around them. Most employees in most organizations are still at step one, treating AI as a fancier search box. The gap between what the tools can do and what the average professional can actually get them to do is widening, not closing. That is the real productivity story of this decade.

The mindset is the linchpin, and it is the part nobody can hand you. Toolset can be purchased. Skillset can be trained. Mindset, the willingness to look at your own work, your own role, your own assumptions about how things get done and let the evidence change your mind, that has to come from inside the person. You either decide AI is real and you are going to figure out how to use it, or you decide to wait it out. Waiting it out is a choice, and it is a choice with consequences.

Here is the harder truth I keep coming back to. Organizations are not keeping up with the toolset either. The governance, procurement, security review and culture changes required to actually deploy what already exists move at the speed of committees. Meanwhile, the outside world keeps accelerating. Welch’s warning was about competition; today it is about relevance. It also applies to organizations as much as people.

I remain genuinely optimistic. AI is the best leverage individuals have ever had to do meaningful work, learn faster and contribute more than their job title suggests. But optimism is not a strategy. The people and organizations that win the next five years will be the ones who treat their mindset as the asset, not the tools.

In today’s world, pick up the new tool. Build the new skill. And every quarter, ask yourself honestly whether you are still the same person, with the same assumptions, you were three months ago. 

If the answer is yes, that is the warning sign.

Published with permission from Heithoff. Subscribe to his substack for more insights: https://brianheithoff.substack.com/.