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When Amazon recently dismantled an internal AI leaderboard, it exposed a broader issue in corporate America\u2019s AI rollout. The leaderboard tracked so-called tokenmaxxing, a trendy corporate phenomenon where employees maximize their consumption of AI processing power to prove they are utilizing the technology. But employees were gaming the system to inflate their productivity scores.<\/p>\n
It was a prime example of a deeper problem: Companies are treating AI as a game of administrative speed rather than business transformation.<\/p>\n
Speaking this week at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Colorado, a panel of industry experts argued that the future of work cannot merely be about layering expensive tools onto outdated processes. Instead, they said, enterprises must fundamentally rewire how their employees operate.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe level of investment in the technology versus the human is woefully lopsided,\u201d said China Widener, Deloitte\u2019s vice chair of technology, media, and telecommunications. \u201cFor every dollar spent, only about seven cents is going to humans, and 93 cents is going to the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
This imbalance explains why AI\u2019s financial rewards so far remain concentrated at the companies with the most resources. Chris Bedi, chief customer officer and enterprise AI advisor at ServiceNow, said that roughly 90% of enterprise AI use cases focus strictly on internal productivity and cost management rather than driving top-line growth. Because most companies are playing defense, they are being left behind. A recent PwC study revealed that just 20% of companies are capturing nearly three-quarters of AI\u2019s total economic value.<\/p>\n
To break this cycle, Bedi urged leaders to move away from shallow \u201cKPI conversations\u201d that track minutes and hours saved, and focus instead on true organizational key results. Phil Wiser, former EVP and CTO at Paramount, suggested a structural fix: creating a centralized, \u201cforward-deployed\u201d engineering team that embeds within various corporate divisions to help them radically reimagine their specific business functions.<\/p>\n
Wiser said younger generations also remain skeptical of AI in part because of the amount of AI slop they see every day. They wonder why they should they engage with this technology that doesn\u2019t appear to improve their lives, he said, arguing that the industry has a messaging problem because it\u2019s too centralized on corporate profit and losing the narrative on the human value of AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the real hurdle to AI integration is psychological, the experts said. True transformation requires \u201cunlearning,\u201d Deloitte\u2019s Widener said. Asking professionals to let go of workflows that have brought them success for twenty years is a big but necessary ask, she said. If executives fail to build trust and clearly communicate how AI augments human capability, they risk triggering widespread cultural pushback.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have a trust problem,\u201d Widener said, \u201cyou\u2019re going to have a culture problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
More from the 25th annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, says there are days he manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once<\/em><\/p>\n The space economy\u2019s next frontier is in ground infrastructure, Northwood Space CEO says<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Not an Allbirds Moment\u2019: Xbox\u2019s new CEO says she is grounding the console in gaming roots not AI<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #real #hurdle #enterprise #isnt #fixing #productivity #KPIs #unlearning #habits<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Amazon recently dismantled an internal AI leaderboard, it exposed a broader issue in corporate America\u2019s AI rollout. The leaderboard tracked so-called tokenmaxxing, a trendy corporate phenomenon where employees maximize… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[328,3849,5861,3181,4256,4606,9274,868,9275,887,62,2775,9276],"class_list":["post-6887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-automation","tag-brainstorm-tech","tag-deloitte","tag-enterprise","tag-fixing","tag-habits","tag-hurdle","tag-isnt","tag-kpis","tag-productivity","tag-real","tag-servicenow","tag-unlearning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}