The Power to Build Has Been Democratized
The key to success for businesses adopting AI in the next two years will be asking the right questions — prompts — and fostering healthy curiosity for new technologies even when they seem to upend all of your prior investments. Then using human judgment to make the right decisions.
The dotcom boom was similar. Back then it was learning about routing protocols and the OSI stack, PKI and proxies. Now, it's MCP gateways, LLMs, and vibe coding. The power to build has been democratized!
Your teams are building apps that solve your company specific needs and combine all of the data across separate repositories. Is it safe? Can you confirm all access and audit the data flows? Balancing the aggressive deployment of AI with regulatory requirements and cybersecurity safety need to be top of mind.
Engagement is essential in today's business environment. Enormous productivity gains are possible, and choosing a particular business line or area for improvement is a good way to start to develop an agentic workflow. According to the McKinsey report The State of AI in 2026, 80% of respondents say productivity of individuals has increased, 50% say that they make better decisions, and 37% report that AI has contributed positively to their organization's EBIT. That's impressive.
Adoption of AI across the enterprise is reported at 44%, yet only 6% of the McKinsey respondents report getting significant value from the use of AI. What's really interesting is the use of coding agents to create applications specific to their business, which will reduce the use of SaaS licenses.
My takeaway is that now is the time to responsibly adopt AI use across the enterprise for worker productivity, and to select projects that can deliver efficiencies for the business.
Some of the topics that interest me are:
- AI Adoption: How should your company test and move into the agentic era?
- Security: What security challenges does this present to your organization, and how can you mitigate them?
- Leadership: Who is leading the AI charge for your company — which teams, and what are your goals?
- Execution: Can you run at full speed using AI without stumbling, prevent a data breach, and begin to realize ROI from that investment?
Now is an amazing time to be alive and to benefit from the greatest technology phase in our lifetime. Your judgment is what decides the output from an AI project. If you have a story to tell or would like to talk about how to accelerate your company's adoption of essential technology…drop me a note. My network and I can work together to help you win!
— Barnaby Page, Page AI Studio