Most conversations about enterprise AI adoption start with the same suspects: employees do not know how to use the tools, teams do not collaborate, data is messy, IT is slow.
My observation from the last six months is different: the decisive factor is usually not the workforce. It is the boss. Specifically, the boss who appears to take AI seriously while quietly blocking every condition required for AI to work.
Here are six failure modes I keep seeing. Many companies hit more than one.