A key sign that an industry is at a crossroads is when the consultants spruiking how to navigate the change outnumber the people actually going through it. So it appears now with AI adoption, across a broad spectrum of industries looking to these technologies as the panacea for what ails them. Throw in ample doses of FOMO, as today’s decision is overtaken by tomorrow’s revolutionary new version, model or practice. The technology services industry finds itself at the nexus: clients want help with AI, and providers must be the experts in it, without yet having much knowledge or experience because it is all so nascent. Customers are discerning, armed with enough knowledge – and unreasonable expectation – to challenge value, while business models are threatened and years-long relationships severed in favour of the latest agentic craze.
We’ve been here before. Public access to the internet, and the move to utility and as-a-service business models like cloud, are two recent examples of “this is going to change everything!” Each time, the predicted scope and scale of the change was widely underestimated, while the timeframes in which it was certain to happen were hugely optimistic. An organisation’s propensity to embrace and accelerate adoption of a new paradigm like AI is a function of its stamina and appetite for change. Organisations, industries and generations have different capacities for the change something like AI can bring.
For business leaders in the technology services space, there is a natural need to respond both to the rapidly moving innovation cycle within AI and to help clients navigate a path through the change AI will bring. There are countless calls for an ‘AI strategy’, and a market of consultants to provide one. In reality, the opportunity and the imperative centre on rebooting the organisation’s core strategy with AI included. The short-termism of expecting AI to take out repetitive, process-defined jobs for cost reduction, without considering the other components of change or the opportunity to do business or serve communities differently, is doomed to fail.
So now we see the full spectrum of responses to the promise of AI being overshadowed by the challenges its true adoption brings. Productivity gains from pre-trained generative AI models are table stakes, but deeper value from AI seems elusive. As the year gets going, 2026 is being called the year we move from ‘experimenting’ to ‘implementing’. Adoption continues to be cited as the core reason AI take-up is not matching expectations. But business leaders are not silly: adoption of any new business process, technology or paradigm must be compelling to everyone. Being part of a change is far better, and far more engaging, than having it visited upon you without consultation. And AI technologies that truly move the dial for a business must be ten times better than the way things are done today – and secure, reliable, performant and, above all, accurate. With AI at a very early stage, expectations on these criteria are currently well ahead of its true capability.
Now we are also being told there won’t be enough of AI’s raw materials to meet demand: data centres, GPUs, RAM, water, power… the list goes on. In our experience, has any technology wave’s linear extrapolation held true over the horizon? Or have order-of-magnitude gains in efficiency and speed been the true driver of ubiquitous take-up? Wobbles in GPU makers’ share prices lend weight to the thinking that thousand-fold improvements are possible, and coming soon. Meanwhile, technology innovation races far ahead of people’s ability to adapt by learning new skills and how to apply them.
There is no doubt a huge change is coming, once we start seeing AI used at the core of business, not just around the productivity edge. In the AI community, viewpoints are split on whether generative AI could deliver what big-bang AI has been trying to do for years: to solve problems beyond human-solvable scale. But what is certain – whether we see it as a drag, or as a healthy pace that allows mistakes to be contained, legislation to be properly formed, and value to be truly demonstrated and embedded in how we work – is that it is the rate of adoption, not technology, not scorched earth, not oblivion, that will govern what happens from here.
That is where true partnerships built over years continue to be valued, as we in the technology services industry work with our vendors and customers to land lasting value that takes everyone on the journey and builds the sustainable next way of doing business.
The most important factor sorting the survivors from the failures across technology, consulting and services organisations is leadership. Leaders who keep their heads, and apply the principles and skills that got them to this position, will be the ones who ultimately triumph.
Because we know that when everything is new, different and chaotic, in a miasma of change that makes everyone’s head spin, there is actually nothing new under the sun.
This article first appeared on LinkedIn on 3 February 2026.