The Last Mile Problem: Why Change Management Is Killing AI at Scale

A global investment bank has deployed over 250 LLM applications connected to enterprise systems. A global payments network reports 99% employee copilot adoption. By any technical measure, these organizations have succeeded at AI deployment. Yet the gains remain, as Harvard Business Review documents, "trapped inside individual workflows." This is the last mile problem. The technology works. The models are capable. The infrastructure is in place. But the organizational design — the workflows, roles, decision rights, and cultural habits that determine how work actually gets done — has not changed to absorb what the technology makes possible. **And it is killing AI at scale.** ## Pilot-Rich, Transformation-Poor Most enterprises have no shortage of AI initiatives. The problem is that those initiatives exist as isolated improvements that never compound into business transformation. HBR identifies this as being "pilot-rich but transformation-poor" — a state where organizations accumulate hund