Nurturing the Green Shoots of AI Adoption

The speed of the generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution presents a new challenge for corporate leaders: front-line employees are often embracing new technology far faster than the managers who govern them. This rapid pace means that the time between AI being a competitive advantage and a competitive necessity is dramatically shorter than in previous technological shifts. Organisations that master fast adoption will define the new rules of their industries.

Many leaders try to meticulously plan every detail of technological change from the top down, favouring a "carpenter's mindset". This approach, however, cannot keep pace with the current rate of change. Leaders who attempt to precisely specify how AI should be implemented across their organisations often find they are constructing yesterday's solutions for tomorrow's problems.

Instead, successful leaders should adopt a "gardener's mindset": nurturing the growth they already observe within the organisation. This means focusing on identifying the "sprouts"—employees or teams experimenting with new technologies and demonstrating promising early results. We have witnessed teams informally using AI to streamline application development or customer service staff quietly deploying AI chatbots to draft responses, dramatically cutting response times. Rather than shutting down such experiments over governance concerns, leaders should study what makes them successful, refine the approaches, and help them scale.

Applying this gardener's mindset requires a shift in leadership focus: spend more time observing patterns and less time crafting rigid, top-down plans. Accept that the most transformative ideas often emerge from unexpected places. By actively recognising and nurturing what is already growing, organisations can advance innovation far more effectively than by attempting to plant seeds based on theories.

The future is continually being redistributed, and learning organisations are the ones reaping the benefits of spotting, nurturing, and scaling early innovation. How will your organisation shift from carpenter to gardener to accelerate AI adoption?

McKinsey Authors: Bob Sternfels and Yuval Atsmon (Based on "The learning organisation: How to accelerate AI adoption," McKinsey & Company, July 2025.