Seventy-three percent of business executives say their company’s approach to AI is well-controlled and highly strategic. But ask their employees, and you’ll get a completely different story.

In fact, ninety percent of executives claim their organization has an AI strategy—yet most employees have no idea what it is. Seventy-five percent of executives say their company has successfully adopted AI in the past year—but employees don’t share that confidence.

The consensus across study after study is clear: the biggest barrier to scaling AI isn’t employees, and it isn’t the technology. It’s leadership.

We’re not thinking big enough.

Too many executives are focused on incremental gains—cutting costs, improving efficiency, automating tasks. Those things matter, but they’re not enough. To see the real return on AI investment—the kind leaders are promising to investors and the street—we need bolder, more imaginative initiatives that move beyond iteration and into innovation.

A recent Axios report illustrated the disconnect perfectly. The dark blue bar represented employee feedback; the purple bar, executive perception. In every case, leaders rated their organization’s AI maturity, literacy, and adoption far higher than their people did. The gap isn’t just about communication—it’s about vision.

In a new research report we’re publishing next week, we found that among companies investing in AI-driven business transformation, only a small elite group—what we call the AI Pacesetters—operate with a true AI vision. But even then, when you look deeper, most of those “visions” aren’t very visionary at all. They’re iterative—focused on optimization, not reinvention.

As an industry, we need to raise the bar. We have to challenge ourselves to dream bigger, to imagine what’s possible in a state of uncertainty, to lead transformation instead of reacting to it.

Right now, only one percent of companies believe they’ve reached AI maturity. One percent.

Executives talk about AI transformation in earnings calls, but behind closed doors many admit they’re frustrated with the lack of progress. They don’t know what they don’t know.

That’s where leadership has to evolve. At some point, leaders have to lead—not just promise transformation, but drive it.

Because the real barrier to AI success isn’t the technology—it’s the imagination steering it.