The Crowdsourcing Myth: Why Bottom-Up AI Strategy Fails the P&L
Most mid-market companies are waiting for an AI revolution to bubble up from the trenches.
They’ve bought the licenses, hosted the hackathons, and told everyone to “just experiment.”
Two years later, the data is brutal: only 5% ever achieve sustained productivity or profit impact. The rest are polishing sharper pencils while the real assembly line stays broken.
Here’s why the bottom-up myth is failing—and what top-down leadership must do instead.