Have We Seen This Movie Before?

What two decades of digital transformation can teach us AI Adoption

I’ve been there before, and perhaps you have too.

You sit down and start scrolling through your subscription platforms looking for a good movie to watch. Finally, you

land on a movie that looks promising. The cast is strong, the description fits your taste, and the algorithm seems confident you’ll like it.

You press play.

About twenty minutes later it hits you.

Wait… I’ve seen this movie before!

The plot feels familiar. The characters are predictable. You suddenly realize you already know how the story unfolds.

In many ways, the current efforts around artificial intelligence adoption feels a lot like that moment. Have we seen this movie before?

The promises of AI and what it will do for your company are reaching all-time highs. Largely, the hype is understandable and real. Nearly every organization is racing to unlock the promised value.

The journey organizations and leaders are on right now follows a familiar pattern. We’ve seen this movie before!

1. The promise is communicated: adopting the right tools will transform your business.

2. The dollars are deployed: Leaders make a big spend on the tools and technology 

3. The ROI starts to get murky: Leaders start to wonder what they’re really getting for all their spend. 

4. Reality sets in: Leaders realize something else is needed to actualize the change

That “something else” is people. 

Leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz in his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World(1) describes the vast difference between technical challenges and adaptive problems. Situations where progress cannot be achieved through technical expertise (or spend) alone. Instead, people inside the system must rethink their assumptions, behaviors, and relationship to the work itself.

If this feels familiar to our emerging AI moment, it’s because organizations have been navigating a similar story for more than two decades during the ongoing era of digital transformation.

The Movie We’ve Seen Before

Over the past twenty years, companies across nearly every industry have invested heavily in cloud infrastructure, enterprise platforms, automation tools, and advanced analytics systems. These efforts, broadly described as digital transformation, were intended to modernize how organizations operate and compete. The technology delivered powerful capabilities. Businesses gained faster access to information, more efficient processes, and new ways to serve customers.

But over time, researchers studying the history of digital transformation noticed a pattern.

Technology mattered, but it rarely determined the outcome on its own.

McKinsey research has shown that fewer than 30 percent of large-scale transformations succeed, with digital transformations facing particularly steep challenges (2)

When organizations did succeed, the difference was rarely the sophistication of their technology stack. It was the degree to which they invested in leadership alignment and cultural change.

In short, they invested in the human system surrounding the technology.

Installing systems and deploying tools was the starting gate. Helping people rethink how work actually happens was the race.

Coming To A Theater Near You: Enterprise Systems, Starring The Ford Motor Company

Consider the wave of enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations that defined an earlier phase of digital transformation.

ERP platforms like SAP promised enormous benefits. They could unify financial data, integrate supply chains, and create a shared operational backbone for the entire organization. Consulting firms frequently positioned these systems as essential infrastructure for becoming a modern digital enterprise. Sound familiar to the narrative we hear about AI today?

Yet many implementations struggled for reasons that had little to do with the technology itself.

Ford Motor Company’s ERP rollout in the early 2000s offers a useful illustration. Like many global manufacturers, Ford invested heavily in enterprise systems designed to standardize processes across its operations. The technology largely functioned as intended.

But the rollout exposed a deeper challenge.

Existing workflows, reporting structures, and decision-making habits had developed over decades. Changing those behaviors proved far more difficult than deploying the technology.

Employees had to learn new systems. Teams had to rethink how information moved between departments. Managers had to rely on shared enterprise data instead of localized processes.

The technology worked. But realizing its value required people to work differently.

Boston Consulting Group’s (3) studies across ERP implementations have consistently shown that organizational resistance, unclear governance, and cultural misalignment are among the most common reasons large-scale technology initiatives struggle, even when the technology and systems themselves function properly.

The challenge was not purely technical. It was adaptive.

Where the Real Work of Transformation Begins

The real work of transformation often starts with tools but it ends with people. 

Once new tools are installed, organizations face a deeper challenge: helping individuals rethink how they approach their work. Transformation asks people to question routines that once defined expertise, adopt unfamiliar workflows, and reconsider what meaningful contribution looks like in a new technological environment.

That kind of change is cultural and behavioral. And adaptive change is inherently difficult.

People rarely abandon established habits simply because a new tool appears. 

They must experiment with new approaches, develop trust in unfamiliar systems, and gradually build confidence in new ways of working. Throughout the digital transformation era, organizations repeatedly discovered that while systems could be deployed relatively quickly, changing the habits and expectations that shape everyday work takes far longer.

When that human work is overlooked, transformation efforts often stall, not because the technology lacks capability, but because the culture surrounding it has not yet evolved.

For many professionals, expertise has historically been tied to producing outputs. When intelligent systems assist with that production, value shifts toward guiding, interpreting, refining, and integrating those outputs. Welcome to the future of work thanks to artificial intelligence.

Rethinking one’s contribution in this way is not a technical adjustment.

It’s an adaptive human one.

The Opportunity: Recognizing We’ve Seen This Movie Before

The early innings of AI adoption (yes, we’re in the early innings) is similar to the history of digital transformation and that may actually be good news.

Organizations do not have to approach this transformation blindly. Two decades of digital transformation have already revealed many of the patterns that shape how technological change unfolds inside organizations.

One lesson stands out clearly.

Transformation does not succeed simply because powerful tools exist.

It succeeds when organizations invest in the human systems that allow those tools to reshape how work happens through leadership alignment, a clear narrative for change, capability development, and new norms for collaboration between humans and technology.

Organizations that recognize this pattern early can approach AI adoption differently. Instead of focusing exclusively on the tools, they can focus on helping people adapt their work around those tools.

And that shift may determine which organizations simply experiment with artificial intelligence and which ones truly transform how they create value.

Because if this moment feels like a movie we’ve seen before, the opportunity is this:

This time, we already know how the story unfolds.

Sources:

(1) Heifetz, Ronald A., Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. Harvard Business Press, 2009 

(2) McKinsey and Company, Alberto Montagner and Angelika Reich. Unlocking success in digital transformations. October 29, 2018

(3) Boston Consulting Group (2018) Why most digital transformations fail. Boston Consulting Group. 2018.