COMMON POWERUp 2026

The numbers are in — and they tell a story most AI vendors don't want you to hear.
 
79% of enterprises are experimenting with AI. Only 8.6% have made it to production. 94% have adopted AI tools, but fewer than half have the governance frameworks to support them. 72% have scaled pilots — but only 33% have governed what they scaled. And after everything, only 6% can point to measurable EBIT impact.
 
And the pace isn't slowing. The CEO of the lab most associated with measured, conservative AI claims is now describing the rate of change as a civilizational tsunami — one most organizations haven't recognized yet. The window to close the readiness gap is not a planning horizon. It's a competitive one. AI-native companies aren't waiting for organizational alignment — they're likely already in your market, and they're building on day one what it took your organization a decade to construct.
 
The IBM i community has always known how to build systems that last. The platform didn't fail. But technology that arrives without organizational readiness doesn't transform — it accumulates. And when Naval Ravikant publicly declares software "uninvestable," he's not making a valuation call. He's pointing at the only layer that still holds durable value: governance, trust, and the organizational infrastructure to deploy at scale.
 
This session is a practitioner's account of what actually happens when you run a technology transformation and an organizational transformation in tandem — not sequentially, not siloed, not hoping the tech carries the org when it's finally ready.
 
This session will explore what transformation actually looks like at both layers — the technology and the organization — and why the sequence and structure of that work matters more than the tools you choose.
 
The organizations that close the gap first won't be the ones with the best technology. They'll be the ones who understood what the technology was actually asking of them.