Last week I wrote that AI won’t create alignment… it may actually accelerate misalignment. The more I’ve thought about that idea, the more convinced I’ve become that we’re about to create an entirely new industry. Not AI implementation… AI remediation.
This post was also sparked by a recent exchange with my longtime friend and business partner John Andrews. I commented on a LinkedIn post that if the current pace of AI adoption continues, the next growth industry might be cleaning up the problems organizations create for themselves. John replied, “Like social media.” My immediate response was, “Way worse.” That short exchange stayed with me. As has often been the case over the past 17+ years, one of John’s thoughtful observations sent me down a path of thinking that eventually became this post.
The AI race is on. Every organization is looking for ways to deploy AI faster, automate more work, reduce costs, and increase productivity. Boards are asking about AI strategies, executives are demanding implementation plans, and employees are experimenting with new tools, often without clear governance or oversight. None of that is inherently bad. In fact, I believe AI has the potential to become one of the greatest productivity and innovation tools we’ve ever created. Used thoughtfully, it can remove friction, eliminate repetitive work, uncover valuable insights, and give people back something increasingly precious… time. What worries me isn’t AI… what worries me is the false sense of confidence AI can create when organizations move faster than their ability to govern what they’re putting in motion.
Social media changed how we interact. AI will change how companies think, decide, and operate. Just because work is produced faster doesn’t mean it’s better. Just because an answer sounds convincing doesn’t mean it’s correct. And just because AI reaches a conclusion doesn’t mean meaningful human judgment has taken place.
The danger isn’t AI itself… it’s mistaking automation for oversight, speed for alignment, and confidence for competence. That’s where I believe many organizations are headed.
As AI becomes woven into everyday workflows, people will naturally begin trusting its output because it appears competent. Most of the time, it will be good enough to move work forward. But “good enough” can also become good enough to avoid scrutiny. Over time, the habit of questioning, challenging, and validating begins to erode… not because people stop caring, but because confidence quietly replaces curiosity.
The next stage concerns me even more. Today AI helps people create work., tomorrow it will summarize it, review it, evaluate it, and increasingly become part of deciding what happens next. Some of this will create tremendous value, but it also creates the potential for AI-generated assumptions to be reviewed by AI, summarized by AI, and used by AI to make the next decision… with fewer meaningful human checkpoints along the way. That isn’t inherently a problem. In many situations, it will improve efficiency and accuracy. The problem arises when organizations begin believing that because multiple AI systems have “validated” something, it has been genuinely challenged. An automated feedback loop can reinforce bad assumptions just as easily as good decisions. Without human judgment at the right moments, errors, biases, and weak reasoning risk becoming institutionalized rather than corrected. This is why I don’t believe AI itself is the risk… the real risk is governance.
I’ve spent much of my career writing and speaking about alignment inside organizations. Alignment has never been something technology creates… it comes from leadership, communication, accountability, and people who ask difficult questions and are willing to challenge assumptions before those assumptions become accepted as truth. AI doesn’t magically solve misalignment. It scales whatever already exists.
That’s the part too many organizations are overlooking. AI doesn’t create culture, trust, or accountability… it amplifies the systems, incentives, and behaviors already in place. If those are healthy, AI can make them stronger. If they’re broken, AI can make them harder to recognize… and much faster to spread.
Organizations with strong cultures, thoughtful leadership, and clear accountability will likely become dramatically more effective with AI. Organizations that already struggle with silos, weak governance, unclear ownership, or poor communication may simply find themselves scaling those problems faster and with far greater confidence. That’s why I believe the next major opportunity won’t simply be helping companies implement AI… it will be helping them recover from implementations that prioritized speed over governance, automation over accountability, and efficiency over judgment. In other words… AI remediation.
The consultants of the next decade won’t just be implementing AI, they’ll be helping organizations rediscover where human judgment belongs, rebuilding governance, restoring trust in decision-making, and helping leaders understand which decisions should never have been handed off in the first place. I don’t believe we’re heading toward an AI crisis… I believe we’re heading toward an accountability crisis disguised as an AI revolution.
Technology can accelerate execution… it cannot replace accountability. No matter how intelligent AI becomes, judgment must always remain a human responsibility. The organizations that will thrive won’t necessarily be the ones that implement AI the fastest, they’ll be the ones that understand where AI adds value, where human judgment remains essential, and how to build cultures where the two work together instead of one replacing the other.
The next decade won’t just be about AI implementation… it’ll be about AI remediation. Because eventually every organization will have to answer one simple question…
Where should human judgment never have left the process?