Harvard Business Reviews's new piece: The rush to use AI can make companies faster at the wrong work.
Many leaders are treating AI as a pressure valve for visible problems, such as slow workflows, rising costs, duplicated tasks, and crowded calendars.
That feels practical, because urgent problems are easy to count, easy to defend, and easy to attach to a dashboard.
The trap is that AI then becomes a way to preserve the current organization at higher speed, rather than a way to rethink what the organization should become.
A firm that uses AI only to produce more reports, more emails, and more deliverables may improve throughput while draining judgment, creativity, and trust.
The deeper question should be not whether AI can automate a task, but whether the task deserves to exist in its current form.
Healthcare offers an example: AI creates more value when it reduces administrative load and supports clinical reasoning than when it simply pushes clinicians to process more patients faster.
The strongest AI strategies will probably feel slower at first, because they require redesigning work, building skills, and deciding where human judgment still carries the value.
