I've been using a phrase lately that seems to land with people: orchestrated momentum.
It came out of conversations with leaders who weren't short on AI activity. They had pilots. Experiments. Someone had built a chatbot. Someone else had automated a workflow. Plenty of motion.
But it wasn't accumulating. One thing wasn't building on another. When attention moved on, the pilots quietly faded. They had motion without momentum.
There's a human cost to scattered AI work that I don't think gets talked about enough.
When experiments pop up without a shared thesis, people fill the silence with their own stories. Usually anxious ones. Is this thing going to replace me? Why is nobody explaining where this is heading? The scattergun approach doesn't build belief. It doesn't rally people around a bigger vision. If anything, it amplifies the fear that AI is coming for their jobs, because nobody's articulating what AI is actually for here.
Whereas when there's a clear intent, when someone can explain how AI creates value and what that means for the people doing the work, something shifts. Not just strategically. Emotionally. People can see themselves in the future you're describing.
I think the missing piece is usually orchestration. Not control, exactly. More like conducting. You're not playing every instrument. You're creating the conditions for people to play together, in time, toward something that sounds like more than the sum of its parts.
In practice that means someone holding the whole picture. A shared thesis about where AI creates value. Governance that lets people move faster with confidence rather than slowing everything down. Feedback loops so experiments inform the next experiment.
Without that, AI work stays scattered. And scattered work exhausts organisations without transforming them.
I've been thinking about what changes when AI can generate almost anything.
When generation becomes cheap, clarity becomes expensive. The hard work isn't producing output. It's knowing what output to produce. It's deciding what should exist and why.
AI generates possibilities and humans decide what matters.
That's true at every level. For individuals, the craft shifts from pure making toward curating. For teams, from velocity to coherence. For leaders, from directing work to designing the conditions where good work emerges.
There's a deeper shift happening too.
Software used to be a tool. You picked it up, used it, put it down. The human was always in control.
AI is different. It acts. It responds to situations in ways that weren't explicitly programmed. It can represent your brand, your values, your voice, whether you've thought carefully about those things or not.
When software becomes an actor, you need to think about its behaviour the way you'd think about a team member's behaviour. What should it do when it's uncertain? What values should guide its responses?
This is systems design. It's culture design. It's not work you can delegate to a pilot project.
I suppose orchestrated momentum is what happens when an organisation gets this. When clarity of intent flows through the system. When AI amplifies human judgment rather than replacing it. When automation creates space for work that actually matters.
Not motion. Momentum. The kind that builds. The kind that has direction, and brings people along with it.