Throughout the business world, the narrative around AI transformation has coalesced into a common story: front-line employees are moving fast, but leadership teams aren't seeing the enterprise transformation they hope for. What's less commonly said — and what Adrienne Down Coulson argues directly — is that the bottleneck isn't the workforce or the technology. It's the C-suite itself.

In her recent Fortune feature and as a panelist at the 2026 Fortune COO Summit, Coulson argues that most executive teams are running on an outdated operating model designed for vertical reporting and functional silos, while asking their organizations to move at AI speed.

She identifies three failure modes of leadership teams that stall transformation:

  • Functional siloing: Leaders optimize for their own departments, creating friction where AI-powered processes should flow across functions.
  • Curated data: Leaders decide based on managed narratives, not ground truth. By the time information reaches the C-suite, it's been filtered through layers of management reporting.  
  • Consensus as a shield: Treating alignment as a requirement on every decision creates what Coulson calls the "alignment tax." Settled decisions get reopened, ownership diffuses, and execution stalls.

The fix, she argues, requires three shifts: enterprise judgment (the ability for leaders to stress-test decisions from the vantage point of the whole company, not just their function), unfiltered visibility into how AI is actually being used on the front lines, and radical trust grounded in explicit decision rights. All three are required for leadership teams to achieve AI speed.

The challenge Coulson leaves leadership teams with is direct: AI transformation won't stall because workers have resisted change or the technology failed to live up to its promise. It stalls when executive teams haven't applied the same pressure to redesigning how they operate.

  • Read Adrienne’s full analysis in Fortune here  
  • Watch her Fortune COO Summit panel with Instacart's Tom Maguire here

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