Gene Kim wrote about the innovator's job in a way that stuck with me: follow the work. Not the org chart. Not the roadmap. The actual work, and the constraints that slow it down.
In the corporate world, innovation is not about ideas. Ideas are cheap. It is about understanding the self-imposed restrictions, the policies, the embedded beliefs, and most of all the people who built them and believe in them. You cannot innovate around people. You have to innovate with them, which means understanding why the restriction exists before you try to remove it.
Most policies were not written to be obstructive. They were written to solve a problem that someone experienced, at a point in time that may no longer be relevant. The policy stayed. The problem moved on.
AI has made this tension sharper. The innovator who understands the organisation's history, its embedded beliefs, its real constraints, now has a tool that can move at a different speed. The x100 is real. But only if someone inside the organisation has the courage to follow the work and bring people with them.
The constraint is no longer the tool. It is the paradigm. And some paradigms are more engrained than others.
A personality assessment recently told me I am better suited to corporate than startup. That landed as a revelation, though in hindsight it explained twenty years of following the work through complex organisations rather than around them.
Do you have a courageous person driving your AI transformation with passion?