Selling to Machines

Don Scheibenreif’s diagnosis is uncomfortable because it is not about the technology: adoption is running bottom-up while denial runs top-down. Over ninety percent of CEOs use AI, yet nobody on the executive team scores as AI savvy—and the chief HR officer ranks last, right as the work becomes redesigning the systems employees engage with. Meanwhile the disintermediation Gartner predicted in 2014 is arriving properly this time, because customers want easy and friction is what intermediaries sell.