What happens when AI shows up in your organization with no plan behind it? In this episode of The Fault Line, Gary Lancina and Kim Scribner dig into what goes wrong when leaders hand their teams AI tools and say “good luck,” and what the better path looks like.

They start with how AI usually arrives: quietly, through individual experimentation, long before anyone writes a formal strategy. From there, they cover why you need to know what you’re trying to achieve before you pick up the tool, the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and the risk of building on AI shortcuts when you don’t understand the work underneath. Along the way, they share stories from their own careers, including a system launch that took down every customer service screen, a chat experiment that outperformed the automation, and how Kim built her own AI inbox assistant.

In this episode:

• Why AI adoption is about changing how people think about work, not just implementing a tool
• The “addiction to the solution” and why teams need to keep the knowledge to work without the tool
• Why AI tools need a product owner to maintain them as things change
• How leaders can find the sweet spot between over-controlling AI use and “all AI all the time”
• Why framing and prompting are new skills, and why AI’s tendency to flatter you is a problem
• How AI-generated content is creating more noise, and why authenticity and human connection may become a competitive edge
• Where humans still matter most: emotional connection, customer experience, and knowing when to hand off from the bot
• Practical guidelines for leaders, plus a reminder to expect the tools to keep shifting

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