Six years ago, I started building an innovation tool.
I poured my soul into it — my earnings, my expertise, my evenings. It was good. Clients used it. It worked. Within two weeks, 50% of participants knew whether their project was worth pursuing. Of those who continued, 80% delivered concrete outcomes within six months.
Then GenAI came along and outcompeted it almost overnight.
I was helping a client with a premortem — a new module I was about to add to the program — when I realized GenAI could do in seconds what the platform helped a client do in two weeks. The quality of ChatGPT was lower, but not low enough to close the gap.
Even with a PhD, even with decades of experience in innovation management, I came face-to-face with a hard truth:
No one is immune to disruption.
Not even the people who study disruption for a living.
The real problem is not the technology
That moment changed something for me. Not just professionally, but in how I understood what organizations are actually up against right now.
I had an unfair advantage: a rough and bumpy career, including a few moves across the Atlantic with my family, had forced me to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. But I also realized that few of my clients had that same instinct to jump feet first into the unknown.
Which made me even more convinced:
The technology is not the problem.
The uncertainty it creates is.
According to MIT’s 2025 GenAI Divide report, only about 5% of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value, while the vast majority show little or no measurable profit and loss impact.
I am convinced these pilots are not struggling because the tools are broken. The real obstacles are human: unrealistic expectations, misaligned incentives, and mistrust between the people who champion change and the people who have to live with it.
The human story behind AI failure
That is why I wrote Rise Above AI Chaos: A Business Fable About Leading Organizations Through the AI Revolution.
The book follows five characters through the messy, human, sometimes uncomfortable reality of making GenAI actually work.
There is Bailey, the visionary CEO who wants big results but does not fully understand the operational cost of change.
Drew, the department head who knows exactly how much effort every “innovation” requires — and is already running on empty.
Ira from IT, asked to deliver more, faster, with less.
Taylor, the young talent who loves GenAI but quietly worries it will make her obsolete.
And Van, the vendor who genuinely believes in his product but knows that much of what he sells will never make it past the pilot phase.
These are not made-up problems. Every single one of them showed up in client work, in conversations, and in boardrooms over the past few years.
So I wrote a business fable about them.
Why a business fable?
I chose the fable format deliberately.
Frameworks and checklists are useful. But what I have found is that the hardest parts of AI adoption — the uncertainty, the nagging feeling when something is off, the frustration when others do not understand what you are trying to accomplish — cannot be captured in a checklist.
These feelings live in conversations and in the spaces between meetings.
A story gets closer to the truth of what it takes to implement GenAI successfully.
Because making GenAI work is not just about choosing the right tool. It is about helping people move through uncertainty, learn quickly, make better decisions, and create real, defensible value for the organization.
From AI activity to AI results
This book will not hand you a shortcut, and it will not promise that the right software budget solves everything.
What it will do is help you learn, as fast as possible, what actually matters — so you can stop guessing and start delivering.
That same discipline is what helped 80% of early users of my innovation approach deliver concrete outcomes within six months. Not because the path was easy, but because they stopped wasting time on the wrong things.
And that, to me, is the real challenge of GenAI right now.
Not more activity.
Not more demos.
Not more pilots that make everyone feel busy.
But learning as fast as possible what creates value, what creates friction, and what needs to change for GenAI to deliver results.
Who this book is for
If you work with or inside an organization wrestling with GenAI right now, this book is for you.
If you are the person in the room trying to make it real while everyone around you is either over-promising or pumping the brakes, this book is especially for you.
Rise Above AI Chaos: A Business Fable About Leading Organizations Through the AI Revolution is now available on Amazon and other stores.
Rise Above AI Chaos: A Business Fable About Leading Organizations Through the AI Revolution