Before you spend another dollar or cut another role in the name of AI, know which one you're actually doing. Most companies are doing at least a little of both.
The belief that you can wave AI's wand at a hard problem and skip the work of solving it. It's sincere, and that's exactly what makes it dangerous.
AI wishing shows up as urgency without diligence. A board member forwards a vendor deck. Leaders clear their calendars for a demo. The demo is genuinely impressive, talented people built it, and it answers questions no one asked before. What it doesn't do is ask any questions back, about your data, your systems, how your teams actually make decisions.
The tool wants clean, connected data and consistent, repeatable decisions. Most real companies have neither. They have a dozen systems that don't agree with each other, layered with a decade of exceptions and workarounds. The gap between the demo and your actual business is where the pilot goes to die.
An executive once brought me an AI product a board member had recommended. It promised to answer any question about the company: sales forecasts, ad performance, waste in how products moved. When we met with the vendor, they didn't ask us a single question, not about our data, our systems, or how we worked. We said no, but it took longer than it should have. Even a room full of people who knew better wanted the promises to be true.
Under pressure to show results now, a company claims to be doing more with AI than it actually is. It isn't lying, exactly. It's describing what it hopes will happen as if it already had.
AI washing starts small. A chatbot becomes the first step in an AI "transformation." A demo becomes proof of what's coming. The board sees progress, and a leader who can't show something starts to look like the problem, so the gap between what's real and what's announced quietly widens.
The most damaging version is the AI layoff: a company proclaims it needs fewer people because AI made it more efficient, when the efficiency doesn't exist yet. The cut is really about freeing up cash, sometimes to spend more on AI. The work doesn't disappear, it shifts onto whoever's left, and companies often quietly rehire for the same role months later.
I know people who were told, in a short meeting, that software could now do what they did. It couldn't, not really. One had given two decades to her company. She wasn't a cost to be optimized, she was the person who knew why the numbers looked the way they did, the context no tool could see. The people who stayed absorbed her work and quietly wondered if they were next.
Skip step one and step three becomes theater. This is the sequence Gold Thread runs on every engagement, not a menu.
Where AI actually creates value for your business, and which problems are actually worth solving. Most companies skip this and go straight to buying tools.
An honest read of three things: your people, your data, and the ROI math. That's what determines whether a pilot becomes a transformation or a stalled experiment.
Including the psychological safety that lets people tell you the truth about what's working. This is the work that outlasts any single AI rollout.
Step three, build the culture, isn't one thing. It's three, and they're the same three pillars behind Julie's book, Chief Impact Officer.
The direct antidote to AI washing. When people are afraid of being blamed for a rollout they were never honestly briefed on, they don't tell you it's failing, they quietly work around it or quit trying. Safety is what makes the truth cheap enough for people to tell you.
The direct antidote to AI wishing. No mandate has ever made a messy, decades-old system clean overnight. Real adoption is earned team by team, by people who trust the person asking them to change how they work, not by an email from the top.
The long game. The companies that actually pull ahead with AI are the ones that treated culture as the system it runs on, not a launch-week slide. Everything in steps one and two eventually depends on this holding up.
These three pillars are the foundation of Chief Impact Officer, out now from 8080 Books / Simon & Schuster.
Order the Book →The AI Wishing/Washing Audit is a blunt, evidence-based read on where you actually stand, and what it will take to close the gap.
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