15. Playbook for Increasing AI Adoption & Value Creation

Four data reports from 2026 tell a consistent story, and none of it matches the adoption narrative. Writer surveyed 2,400 global workers and C-suite leaders: 97% of executives deployed AI agents in the past twelve months, 29% reported significant ROI. Glean's Work AI Index found a name for what most knowledge workers are actually experiencing: botsitting — spending more time supervising and correcting AI than gaining anything back. Section's biannual proficiency survey: 67% of workers use AI weekly, 5.5% are proficient enough to generate consistent value, and 79% of managers haven't demonstrated their own AI use to their team in the past month. Token consumption per organization grew roughly 320 times in twelve months while the share of organizations reporting significant ROI stayed at 29%.

Brittany Hobbs and Arpy Dragffy work through what's causing the gap, why the teams trying hardest to close it keep hitting structural walls, and what it takes to move from measuring adoption to generating defensible value — for individual contributors, for teams, and for the organizations responsible for this investment.

What you'll learn:

• OpenAI, Writer, Glean, Section: four reports, one consistent signal — the adoption story hides the value failure.
• Glean 2026: botsitting is the dominant AI experience. More knowledge workers are losing time to AI than gaining it.
• 67% of workers use AI weekly. Only 5.5% are proficient. The problem isn't more training days. It's the model of change.
• Four years of measuring seats over outcomes has left AI leaders unable to defend their budgets. The window is closing.
• Salesforce agreed to acquire Fin for $3.6B. What they built before that exit is the lesson most orgs are ignoring.
• Boris Cherny no longer prompts — he builds loops. What that means for every team not yet running autonomous evaluation.

Articles referenced in this episode:

• 97% of Executives Deployed AI Agents. Only 29% See ROI. — Brittany's breakdown of the Writer 2026 survey and the 68-point deployment-to-value gap
• The 10% Problem: AI's Value Gap Is Wider Than Anyone Is Admitting — Why AI value is concentrating at the top and what it means for the rest of the organization
• WTF is an AI-native org anyways? Let's compare Airbnb & Meta's opposing plans. — The competing models for AI-native organization design
• OpenAI & Anthropic are charging us way more than we need — Arpy on token economics, model selection, and the cost side of AI value creation

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Hosted by:

• Arpy Dragffy Guerrero — https://www.linkedin.com/in/adragffy/
• Brittany Hobbs — https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanyhobbs/

Go to Substack to get AI strategy frameworks, news, and jobs: https://productimpactpod.substack.com

This episode was brought to you by: PH1 (https://ph1.ca) — an AI strategy consultancy specialized in improving the measurable success of AI products. AI Value Acceleration

(https://aivalueacceleration.com) — The consultancy specialising in enterprise value creation. Make sure that your spending doesn't go to waste. Find out exactly where the value creation of adopting AI products stalls.