Principal Brad Jayne was featured in the Fortune article, “Companies Are Spending Trillions on AI. The C-Suite Doesn’t Know Who Is in Charge of It,” which highlights findings from Pearl Meyer’s Q2 2026 Market Intelligence Survey.
The article explores a key disconnect uncovered by Pearl Meyer’s research: as organizations accelerate their investments in artificial intelligence, leadership teams are not always aligned on who owns AI strategy, how prepared they are to implement it, or how much change their people can handle.
According to Pearl Meyer’s Q2 2026 Market Intelligence Survey, leaders' expectations for AI's near-term impact on individual companies do not seem rooted in how much progress has been or will soon be made in implementing it.
Brad Jayne, principal at Pearl Meyer and a study coauthor, told Fortune that organizations also face an “impact-versus-speed tension” when implementing AI. While providing employees with tools such as ChatGPT or Copilot can happen relatively quickly, “Building big systems around that and pushing them through the organization and making sure it’s not making errors, that takes a lot longer.”
The research also revealed significant differences in how leaders view their organizations’ capacity for change. When asked whether employees could take on additional organizational change without becoming stretched too thin, 63% of CEOs agreed, compared with just 33% of C-suite executives and 40% of non-C-suite executives.
At the board level, perceptions of the changes ahead diverged again. While 88% of CEOs and 79% of C-suite executives said achieving strategic goals will require significant changes to how their organizations operate within the next three years, only 42% of directors agreed.
Taken together with the findings on employees’ capacity for change, Jayne told Fortune, “that’s an alarm bell for me.”
“The board is basically saying, ‘We’re good. We’ve made investments, we’re structured right, go make changes,’” said Jayne. “And the management team is saying, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. In order to be effective here and get our strategy done, we’re going to have to make big changes in how we operate together.’”
As companies continue investing heavily in AI, the findings point to a growing need for alignment among boards, CEOs, and management teams around accountability, organizational readiness, and expected outcomes. Without that alignment, Jayne cautioned that organizations could face difficult questions if boards and management teams cannot connect AI spending to outcomes investors recognize and value.
“I worry about finger pointing,” Jayne told Fortune, adding that challenges could ultimately be attributed to issues ranging from organizational culture and learning agility to insufficient experimentation with AI tools.
Read the full article in Fortune and explore Pearl Meyer’s Q2 2026 Market Intelligence Survey for additional findings.