As a person who studies business acumen for a living and has been doing so for more than 50 years, I can sleep pretty well at night without worrying that AI is going to take over the world and kill all the humans.

Turn on the news, listen to a podcast, or spend ten minutes scrolling through your social media streams, and you might reach a different conclusion. Apparently, artificial general intelligence is coming, superintelligence is right behind it, millions of jobs are going to disappear, humans will become obsolete, and the machines will take over sometime around a week from next Thursday.

Maybe.

But I have a slightly more cynical, and much more boring, business acumen perspective.

Eventually, somebody has to pay for all of this. And that is where things get interesting.

A Little History Lesson

Over the past 150 years, we have seen versions of this movie before.

Banking became enormously powerful and complicated. Pharmaceuticals experienced explosive innovation and investment. Agriculture industrialized. Telecommunications transformed the world. The internet created entirely new industries. Software changed virtually every business process. Cryptocurrency arrived promising to reinvent money itself.

The technologies were different, but the business cycle often had some familiar characteristics.

An exciting new opportunity emerges. Capital pours in. Companies race to establish leadership. Investors reward growth. Competitors spend aggressively because nobody wants to be left behind. Infrastructure gets built. Talent becomes incredibly expensive. Expectations become enormous.

For a while, almost nobody wants to be the person in the room asking the boring questions.

How much is this costing us? Where is the return? When will this investment generate positive cash flow? What happens if demand doesn't grow as quickly as projected? What are the risks?

And perhaps the most important business acumen question of all: Is the next dollar we invest going to create more value than the last dollar we invested?

Within the past month, the number one burning issue I have heard from business leaders, ranging from pharmaceutical companies to professional services firms, has been how to respond to customers demanding lower prices for products and services because a company “uses AI.”

The argument sounds logical.

“You’re using AI. AI makes your people more productive. The work takes less time. Therefore, you should charge me less.”

Maybe.

But maybe not.

For any business, using AI has two edges to the sword. On the one hand, when people who know what they are doing use AI effectively, they can create significant efficiencies, produce better work faster, and sometimes more cheaply.

On the other hand, AI isn't free, and there is a much steeper learning curve than most people understand. Companies are investing enormous amounts of money in platforms, infrastructure, integration, security, governance, training, and new capabilities. And when you factor in rework and lost productivity from people misusing AI and producing what has affectionately become known as “AI slop,” the economics aren't nearly as simple as customers might think.

As the calendar turns and summer is over, business leaders realize things get much more serious. There is one month left in the third quarter and precious little time to make a major impact on the fourth quarter. And then, before we know it, Q1 2027 will be here.

On top of all that pressure, we are living and working in unprecedented times. Economic uncertainty, rapidly changing technology, geopolitical issues, shifting customer expectations, and AI are creating challenges and opportunities at a pace most organizations have never experienced.

It is why I continue to hear business leaders say some version of the same thing:

When I first saw the number, I laughed it off as someone on our Operations team making a simple mistake. There is no way that only 58% of all the enrolled participants are actually showing up for their leadership training.

But upon further review, the number wasn't a mistake. Over the last three years, we have seen a steady decline in attendance from 67%, to 61%, to 58%.

Ten years ago, very few people would dare not show up for a leadership training program. Being selected was considered a privilege and a visible sign that the company was willing to invest in your career. Today, too many employees view training as something closer to a punishment.

Another meeting. Another day away from the work. Another eight hours of emails piling up while someone teaches you a leadership model you may or may not ever use.

I have been in the leadership development and business acumen training business for a long time.

Long enough to remember when “web-based training” was going to change everything.

Then came eLearning. Cloud-based learning. Mobile learning. Virtual classrooms. Hybrid learning. Microlearning.

Every few years, something new would revolutionize corporate training. And most of the time, it didn't. It changed how we delivered the training, but it didn't fundamentally change what happened during the training.

The classroom became a browser. The workbook became a PDF. The instructor became a video. The breakout room became a virtual breakout room.

But the underlying model remained remarkably similar: give people content, teach them a framework, let them practice it, discuss what they learned, and hope they remember enough to use it six months later.

AI is different, and I think it is going to fundamentally break that model.