The Leadership Crisis AI Created (But Didn't Cause

AI didn't break your organization. It revealed what was already broken. In this season opener, Dr. Marilyn Carroll unpacks why 42% of companies abandoned their AI initiatives in 2025 — and why the real failure isn't technological. It's structural. From accountability gaps to decision bottlenecks that predate AI by years, this episode reframes the conversation: AI is a pressure test, not a cause. If your leadership systems are cracking under the weight of it, this is where we start. Listener across 17 countries and 220+ cities — this one is for every leader who has felt the weight of AI disruption without being able to name exactly why.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi, I'm Dr. Marilyn Carroll, and welcome to Two Doctors and a Twist. Well, Dr. Jamie is going to be out uh over this next 12 episodes. And so I am bringing to you something that's near and dear to me. And we're going to start with episode one. And like I said, it's about 12 episodes that we'll be coming to you with. And this first episode is about leadership crises that the leadership crisis that AI created but didn't cause. So let's get started and some more about that. So basically, in your organization, or if your organization is struggling with AI, AI is not the problem. No, guys, it is not the problem. Let that sit with you for a second. Because right now, across industries, companies are blaming AI for failed rollouts, stole initiatives, and uh disappointing results. But the truth is, get this now. AI didn't create those problems. It exposed them. And I've been saying this for a while. If you any of you follow me on social media, in the social media platforms. Basically, guys, we are living in one of the most misunderstood moments in leadership. AI is being framed as a productivity tool, a technology upgrade, a competitive advantage. And yes, it can be all those things, but the framing misses something deeper. And what do you mean, Marilyn, by that? Well, AI is not just changing how work gets done, AI is changing what gets revealed. Yeah. And that's what is revealing is the quality of the system you've built as a leader. Because when AI enters an organization, basically, it does three things immediately. It makes performance measurable, it accelerates feedback, and it amplifies decisions. And that's not theory, that's what we are seeing in real data. So, Marilyn, give me the proof on that. Why do you say these things? Where are you coming from? Well, let me ground this in something concrete. A 2025 study by World Economic Forum found that 63% of employers say skill gaps are the number one barrier to transformation. Not technology, not cost, not tools, skills. Did you get that? The skills. Now, another study by McKenzie and Company found only about 1% of companies consider themselves AI mature. And even though nearly all are adopting AI, and here's the one that should really get your attention, guys. Research from Boston Consulting Group shows that 70% of AI transformation success comes from people and processes. Only 10%, get this, 10% comes from algorithms. So when leaders say, oh, our AI initiative failed, what the data actually says is your leadership system wasn't ready for what AI revealed. Now here's the reframe. I want you to get this. This is where I want to shift your thinking. Because AI is not just a tool, it's a diagnostic system. So what do you mean, Marilyn, when you say that? In my work, I call this AI exposure effect. So AI reveals capability gaps, accelerates feedback, and amplifies the consequences of systems design. So what used to stay hidden for months, maybe sometimes years, and we've seen that in some of the failures of companies, now is showing up in days. So what used to be subjective now becomes measurable. What used to be manageable now becomes undeniable. And that creates discomfort because suddenly, suddenly, guys, you can see who is actually capable, where the decisions are unclear, what accountability is missing, and where your systems break. And I'm seeing this as an executive coach, as a professor, as a business owner myself. AI didn't create the breakage. AI didn't create these challenges, it just turned the lights on, so to speak. Now I can see around the corner, so to speak. So the real problem, get this. Now you ready for this? The real problem is so if AI isn't the problem, what is? There are three patterns I see over and over again. Here you go. Ambiguous authority. No one knows who's actually owns the decision. AI makes recommendations, teams act on them, but when something goes wrong, no one steps forward. Decision bottlenecks is the second thing I see. So we got ambitious and ambiguous uh authority, and now we have decision bottlenecks, is number two. Everything still flows through the same few people. AI speeds up information, but the leadership doesn't speed up decisions. Why? I don't know. At this point, we're not going to talk about it. I do know, but we're not going to talk about it. Okay. So the system stalls. The third thing is accountability gaps. Responsibility is shared, but accountability is not named. And in AI-enabled environments, that is where risk concentrates. The risk that is embedded that we keep talking about in various situations is where risk concentrates. This is exactly what I wrote about in what's next for executives in an AI-driven world. This is an article I wrote as a research paper I wrote about as well. Leaders are not struggling to use AI, they are struggling to govern it. That distinction matters because adoption creates speed, but governance creates stability. And I know you've heard that from me before, those of you who follow me. Now, leadership decision moment. This is a leadership decision moment that comes to play. Let me give you a real pattern. So say a company rules out an AI system for customer service. The tool works, it improves response time, it reduces workload. Everything looks good on paper. Okay. But customers start complaining. The answers are fast, but not helpful. The system optimizes speed, has done that. Not experience. So leadership steps in. And here's the question: who is accountable for the system? Challenges we're the customers are experiencing, really. The team using it, or is it the vendor? Or is it the leader who approved it? In most rooms, I get complete silence when I ask that question. Yeah, silence, guys. Not because people don't care, but because the system was never designed to answer that question. That is not an AI failure. That is a leadership design failure. So now the real question really becomes, guys, how do leaders respond? Because I see two types. Reactive leaders, they treat AI as a threat. Oh, this is gonna kill us. This is gonna mess us up. Why are we gonna put that in? Oh, security challenges. The list goes on. They slow things down. They blame the tool. They try to control outcomes after the fact. And things begin to stall or don't go anywhere at all. That's the reactive leaders. And now the second type I see is the responsive leaders. They treat AI as information. How do they do that? They ask, what is this showing me about my system? Where are the gaps? What needs to be redesigned? Reactive leaders manage systems. Responsive leaders redesign systems. And in the in the AI era, that difference determines everything. You hear me? Everything. So let me give you an example of a situation that occurred. I had this client, and my client kept complaining about a particular challenge they were having on the team, and they used brought in AI to fix the challenge. This particular challenge happens to be around accounting. And as they were going through the process thinking, oh, we're going to get this. And so the leader wasn't in the process of how it was designed. They were only in the process of the meeting, the project meeting, where people were talking about it. In addition, what I found is a lot of these leaders, a lot of us as leaders, never understood how the system works, what to expect, how do you put something together? Before you didn't have to know those things. Now you do. Before, uh, one may not have had to get on the ground, understand what was happening, and in order to ascertain how I want things to be. I thought the best thing I could have done in the training programs that we have, uh, and not that this is a sales pitch, the CFO AI, CFO certification, or the AI educator certification, or the manager's training or leadership training, is that you have to not only introduce people to the literacy portion of AI and then to the process that AI goes through, but you have to also introduce them to building something so that they can feel it, taste it, understand it when something they're asking for something on their team. Yes, the leader now has to change. So this brings me back to where we started. If your organization is really struggling with AI, it's not your problem. Your problem is what it is AI is really revealing. There may be gaps in capacity or gaps in clarity, gaps in accountability, gaps in design, like I just uh spoke about. AI didn't break your organization, it exposed it. Before the next episode, I want you to do this. This is something I want you to do that is simple but powerful. So get your pad and pencil and write this down. Okay, where in your organization are the decision bottlenecks? Or bottlenecking? Is accountability? This is number two, is accountability unclear? Is trust low? Are you avoiding clarity? Those are four questions. Number one, are your decisions bottlenecking? Two, is accountability unclear? Three, is trust low? Or four, are you avoiding clarity? By answering those questions, and I don't want you to answer them quickly, I want you to sit with it. Because those answers are exactly where your leadership works. So on our next episode, we go through a deep, we go deeper into something most organizations think they have figured out AI governance. They don't, and I'm going to show you why. I'll see you on the next episode of Two Doctors and a Twist. And remember, Dr. Jamie is going to be out for this particular uh limited series, and you have me, guys, and I hope that I bring to you some very valuable information that you can use because in this whole process we've been doing two doctors and a twist. It is for the most part to provide knowledge to you so that you have firsthand information on what's going on from experienced experts in the area. I'm Dr. Marilyn Carroll, and again, I'll see you on the next episode of Two Doctors and a Twist. Take care.