AI Real Talk: It’s Time to Compete on Impact, Not Adoption

Brandon Sammut, the Chief People & AI Transformation Officer at Zapier, explains why it’s time for companies to start competing on the impact AI has on their business, not on adoption rates. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, it’s felt like every company has been racing to prove its AI credentials. Chatbots launched overnight, and entire teams were spun up to explore what this new technology could do. There’s a lot of noise, to say the least.

Now that the hype has cooled a bit, the leaders are starting to separate from the crowd. If the AI arms race was about adoption, the next era is about integration. And that’s where the real competitive edge will emerge.

The hard part isn’t adopting AI—it’s integrating it into how work actually gets done

AI adoption has skyrocketed. Take Zapier, for example. Ninety-seven percent of our team uses AI in their core work. This trend aligns with Zapier’s recent survey of more than 500 enterprise leaders, which found that 92% of organizations treat AI as a business priority and that over half describe themselves as enthusiastic champions of the technology.

That enthusiasm is real. We hear it in boardrooms and see it in AI pilot projects every day. But enthusiasm alone doesn’t drive results: For example, nearly four in five enterprises (78%) struggle to connect AI tools to their existing systems. That’s a major friction that keeps AI from moving beyond adoption into measurable impact.

It’s one thing to build or buy an AI tool. It’s another to make that tool talk to your CRM, your analytics dashboard, and your customer support system. Without these connections, even the best AI ends up operating in isolation—helpful in small ways but limited in scope. Integration—both among tools and across people—is what generates step-change business results.

Why AI progress slows, and how to reaccelerate

The early movers in AI earned attention by adopting fast. But today’s leaders are earning results by rearchitecting how work gets done from the ground up.

Redesigning how humans and AI work together requires us to rethink the connections across tools and people. When your AI tools can access the same customer data, trigger the same workflows, and feed insights across systems, they amplify each other’s value. Suddenly, it’s not just one department getting smarter—it’s the entire organization learning and improving together.

Companies that focus solely on adding new AI tools will eventually hit a ceiling. Those who build an integrated network of tools and people will keep improving long after the next model or vendor emerges. The challenge is that this type of integration often stalls. Many organizations rely on IT to lead AI efforts, and Zapier’s research shows that IT is 10 times more likely to accelerate AI than any other department. While that centralization protects security, data handling, and compliance, it also creates a bottleneck: when every integration request or workflow update requires technical review, teams move more slowly, and innovation goes underground in ways that are (ironically) riskier than proactively enabling employees to build their own AI workflows.

That’s why we see companies turning to no-code automation platforms like Zapier. It gives teams—regardless of technical expertise—the flexibility to build intelligent, governable AI-powered systems without waiting for technical support.

That shift unlocks a second wave of AI impact: Once teams can build and refine their own AI-powered workflows, innovation comes from everywhere. Marketing can plug AI into their scoring systems without waiting for approvals. Support can fold AI into ticket routing the moment new patterns show up. Ops can connect AI to real-time data and adjust processes on the fly. And IT still oversees the guardrails, but they’re no longer the sole gateway for every integration. The result is a business where AI isn’t just present in a few tools—it’s embedded across systems, constantly connected, and continuously improving how work gets done.

The next phase of AI competition

AI doesn’t transform an organization on its own. It’s a means to an end—greater customer experiences, more engaged employees—not the end itself. The companies that thrive in the coming years will treat AI as an integrated layer of their operations rather than a collection of disconnected experiments. They’ll invest in the infrastructure, standards, and tools that allow teams to move quickly while staying aligned with the organization’s security and compliance expectations. With that foundation in place, improvements won’t just add up; they’ll compound.