Top leadership experts sound the alarm on the AI doomsday: bosses are choosing tech over people

Imagine someone upstream in your company just deployed an AI agent. Their throughput doubles overnight. Work starts flying to you at twice the speed. But you’re still in Excel. You still don’t have access to the company’s data lake. Overnight, you’ve become the bottleneck — the weak link in a chain that’s suddenly moving faster than ever.

“This will expose the weakest link in an organization,” said Eric Bradlow, chair of the marketing department and vice chair of AI and analytics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who uses that exact scenario to describe what he fears is coming. “If efficiency gains are happening here but not here,” he said, gesticulating with his hands, “it will be exacerbated and you will see it quickly.”

That bottleneck problem is materializing across corporate America — and the root cause isn’t technology. It’s that companies aren’t doing the hard, unglamorous work of preparing the people who are supposed to be working alongside it.

The 7% problem

The numbers are stark. Across the corporate sector, consultants and analysts see similar, troubling patterns. According to Deloitte’s most recent Tech Trends report (covered by