Why The CEO Struggle with AI Was Entirely Predictable
Axios Communicators’ February 5th newsletter crystallized a reality many of us who live in and around AI have seen coming: “Business leaders are struggling to tell their AI story to employees, shareholders, customers and regulators as skepticism of the technology grows.”
The silver-bullet fantasy failed (for now).
Here’s the unspoken assumption: CEOs expected AI to magically increase revenue and cut labor costs, but most organizations lack the skills to use AI, the training to embed it, the trust to socialize it, and the workflows to support it. In such a hostile environment, AI cannot possibly deliver.
According to MIT’s State of AI in Business 2025, 95% of businesses have failed to successfully implement AI, resulting in zero return on investment despite significant investment.
The truth: most people still don’t know how to use AI effectively.
Deloitte’s mid-2024 research showed that only 19% of executives used AI regularly to support their jobs. That should have been the red flag. You cannot champion a technology you don’t understand, and you cannot communicate a vision you don’t know how to operationalize.
Generative AI may be intuitive in theory, but high-quality prompting, i.e., the ability to architect tasks and orchestrate logic through language, has become a new form of digital literacy. And right now, very few people are truly literate.
Employees see AI as confusing. Managers see it as overwhelming. Axios cites anxiety levels as high as 68% among individual contributors.
The rhetoric-to-reality gap is enormous.
We’ve spent the past two years swimming in AI themed talking points: innovation, transformation, acceleration, and empowerment. But rhetoric is not capability, and messaging is not mastery.
Axios highlighted what many insiders already know: skills gaps, employee skepticism, unclear use cases, and communication hurdles are slowing AI adoption.
This disconnect isn’t a comms problem. It’s a substance problem.
But this stagnation will not last.
There is a massive shift coming. And once it happens, adoption will accelerate exponentially. Here’s why:
Billions in AI investment will inevitably translate into a new normal
Millions of people are being pushed into AI-native environments
Generation Alpha will be the first AI-native workforce
Data will be intentionally structured to fuel AI systems
Bots will talk to bots to execute tasks autonomously
The bottom line.
This moment is bigger than a message. The transition from the information era to one defined by the integration of AI requires systemic change, previously understood truths to be challenged, and an understanding that core to success is operational readiness and exuberant exploration.
Ariel Kouvaras is a Senior Managing Director leading the AI practice with a strong background on integrated communications.
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