The tools where never the problem.
A software CEO just told everyone to stop buying software.
His name is Rich Veldran. He runs GoTo — an IT and communications company that sells tools for a living. So when a man like that stands up and says the tools are not the problem, you ought to lean in and listen.
Because he is arguing against his own shelf.
He wrote it plain. The debate over whether AI works is settled. We have seen what it can do. The real question now is whether we are working alongside it the right way.
Most companies, he says, are not.
Here is the number. IBM’s research arm looked at AI initiatives across business. Only one in four delivered the return the company expected. Only one in six ever scaled across the whole operation.
Years of money. Real enthusiasm. And most of it never crossed the finish line.
The tools worked fine. The building around them did not get built.
I have watched this exact thing on a job site. A man buys the best saw money can make. Top of the line. Then he never learns to read a blueprint, never sets a square line, never checks his cuts. The saw is not the problem. The saw is perfect.
The problem is standing behind it.
Veldran points to another study, from Boston Consulting Group. They looked at the companies actually winning with AI. And the winners spend their money in a shape that surprises most people.
Seventy cents of every dollar goes to their people and how they work. Twenty cents goes to the plumbing underneath. Only ten cents goes to the AI model itself.
Ten cents on the machine everybody is chasing.
Most companies, he says, have that backwards. They pour the money into the model and starve the people. Then they wonder why the return never shows up.
Here is where he walked straight onto ground I have been standing on for over a year.
He gave three fixes. The first two are about training real people to use real judgment. Good. Necessary. But it was the third one that made me sit up.
He said stop treating AI policy like a box you check.
He said the companies getting this right have built the governance into how they plan and do the work — every day, in the doing. Not written up in some acceptable-use document that sits in a drawer and gets signed once and forgotten.
That is it. That is the whole thing.
That is what The Faust Baseline has said since the first post I ever wrote. Governance that lives in a binder governs nothing. Governance has to live inside the work, in the room, in the moment the decision gets made — or it is just paper.
A rule you signed in orientation does not ride along with you at two in the afternoon when the AI hands you an answer and you are tired and the deadline is close.
Conduct in the moment is the only conduct that counts.
Now let me hold my own line. Veldran is a CEO writing an opinion piece. That is a softer thing than a hard study. So I am not leaning on what he thinks. I am leaning on the numbers he brought — IBM’s one in four, BCG’s seventy-twenty-ten. Those stand on their own two feet whether he wrote the piece or not.
But the shape of what he is saying and the shape of what I have been building are the same shape. A man who sells tools, telling a whole industry the tools were never the thing.
The gap between what AI can do and what it actually delivers is not a technology gap.
It is a leadership gap. A human gap. A gap in what got built around the machine instead of inside it.
I have been saying that for eighteen months. And one by one, the people with the big titles and the big research budgets keep arriving at the same door.
They are not late. They are welcome.
But some of us were already inside, holding it open.
Written with my AI partner | The Faust Baseline™ | intelligent-people.org
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Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
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