Every leadership team is asking, "How do we use AI to gain a competitive advantage?" But that's the wrong question.
The companies pulling ahead are the ones with organizations capable of turning AI capabilities into measurable business outcomes. Technology can accelerate execution, but it can't compensate for unclear priorities, inefficient operations, or unsustainable practices.
AI isn't creating great companies. It's acting as a force multiplier, exposing and amplifying the strengths and weaknesses that already exist. We see it across our portfolio every quarter: the same tools producing very different outcomes.
An aligned organization uses AI to eliminate friction, improve decision-making, and accelerate execution around shared priorities. A misaligned organization uses AI to produce more work, create disconnected workflows, and move faster in different directions. The technology is the same. The outcomes are not.
That's because AI compounds the condition an organization already has:
Companies with strong operating foundations become faster and more effective.
Companies without them simply become more efficient at creating complexity.
The lesson here is to recognize that AI cannot replace the operating discipline required to use it well, a key theme of our 2026 Growth Index.
According to our research, organizations that consistently translate AI investments into business value share three characteristics:
Alignment. Teams understand the company's priorities and make decisions that reinforce the same objectives.
Efficiency. Investments—whether in people, technology, or AI—generate measurable improvements in performance rather than simply increasing activity.
Sustainability. Teams maintain a pace of execution that they can sustain over time without relying on constant heroics or burnout.
Together, these behaviors make up what we call Healthy Urgency: the organizational condition where leaders execute against shared priorities with enough intensity to drive results, and enough discipline to sustain that pace.
Healthy Urgency is the operating system that allows AI to scale company-wide. Without it, AI often remains isolated within individual teams, solving local problems while creating new friction elsewhere. But with it, AI becomes embedded into shared workflows, compounds organizational learning, and accelerates execution across the entire organization.
Every company will have access to increasingly powerful AI tools. Over time, the technology itself will become less of a differentiator. But execution will not.
The organizations that create lasting advantage will build cultures where priorities are aligned, resources are deployed efficiently, and teams can sustain high performance long enough for AI to compound those strengths. AI won't build that foundation for you. But it will reward the companies that already have it – faster than anything we've seen.
For the full conversation, listen to my episode of Electrifying Growth.
AI can improve productivity, but it doesn't solve underlying organizational challenges. Companies with clear alignment, efficient operations, and sustainable execution are better positioned to translate AI into measurable business value. Without those foundations, AI often accelerates existing inefficiencies instead of creating a lasting advantage.
Healthy Urgency is an operating model built on three pillars: alignment, efficiency, and sustainability. It enables organizations to execute quickly while maintaining focus and long-term performance.
Before expanding AI initiatives, leaders should ensure their organizations are aligned around shared priorities, measure whether investments produce meaningful business outcomes, and build operating rhythms that can be sustained over time. Once these fundamentals are in place, AI becomes a multiplier of organizational performance.