Every room I speak in does the same thing. For an hour I show them what this technology can do and, just as importantly, how easy it is to start. They lean in. They laugh in the right places. Afterwards people queue up to tell me how much they enjoyed it. Then I ask the only question that matters: so when are you going to start?
The response is usually close to the popularity created from breaking wind in a spacesuit.
I used to take that personally. I don't any more, because I've heard it in far too many rooms for it to be coincidence.
It's what I heard from a room of firm leaders when I put it another way. Hands up if you have an AI pilot running. Almost all of them did. So what's stopping you getting beyond it? The answers were mostly about people, not technology: fear, confidence knocked by a lukewarm first attempt, not knowing where to start and not wanting to get it wrong. When the question came up of whether people are simply waiting for permission, the answer was: sometimes.
This is the first of two short pieces from the field observations in a whitepaper I'm writing, and it comes first because, of everything I've seen working with organisations across sectors and geographies, inertia is the biggest single constraint on AI progress. Not the cost, not the governance, not the data, not even the technology. The single biggest barrier to progress is the tyranny of "business as usual" or if you like the inertia that prevents any of us from taking the time out to find a better way.
Sometimes, it's tempting to confuse inertia with laziness but in my experience it's usually the complete opposite. Laziness is too lazy a diagnosis (pun intended) and similarly, easier to cure. "Busyness" however is much more insidious.
When a leadership team I worked with stepped out of the day job for a day to map what stood between them and the benefits of AI, the biggest barriers they named were human and organisational, not technical. Time, trust and competing priorities dominated. Learning kept losing out to the day job, and AI still felt like an add-on rather than part of it. These are capable, committed, over-stretched people. Ask them why they haven't started and "no time" isn't an excuse. It's an accurate description.
I wrote about this in my first book, long before generative AI: people like what they know, and if you can't help them change, the technology moving on around them makes no difference. Inertia is what a sensible, busy, slightly nervous person does when learning something new costs real time now and the payoff is hard to see until later. It isn't a character flaw. It's a very reasonable response to a bad trade.
And the trade is bigger than simply learning a tool. Nobody schedules in some "discovery time" into their diary. "I wonder what could be different" is a phrase not many of us have the luxury of being able to carve out a quiet moment for.
And that's always going to be our greatest challenge - stopping long enough to look up and ask what this might change about the work itself: not how to do today's job faster, but whether it's still the right job. That's the thing the day job is least likely to make room for, because the day job is made of exactly the things you'd be questioning. We're so busy being busy that we never get to ask what the busyness is for.
But I guess we should also be mindful, that like all things, this too will pass. At the beginning of my career, I remember the first (and only) PC going to the senior partner. He never even switched it on. His PA printed out his emails, he annotated them in red pen, and she typed up the replies. And about a decade or so later, every single member of the firm not only had one of their own on their desk, but likely a second device in their pocket. We got there in the end. The question this time is whether we want to wait a decade.
Last week I wrote about the people who won't wait for permission, the ones who turn up with their own agents and get on with it. They're real, and I'm glad of them. But they're the ones who would have got there anyway. Everyone else, the people in those rooms, is waiting: for time, for confidence, for someone to make it feel alright to begin.
Which leaves two questions I don't have good answers to. What is actually stopping smart, busy people from taking a few hours a week to learn new ways of working? And what's at risk if you never make that time?