Real enterprise transformation with AI requires six foundations, not one. Here’s how to build them all

In 2024, Boston Consulting Group surveyed more than 1,000 C-suite executives and found that just 4% of companies were generating substantial value from artificial intelligence. A year later, that figure had risen to 5%. It is tempting to read this 25% year-on-year increase as the beginning of liftoff, the start of a series of compounding increases that will eventually drive AI-powered efficiency gains in every corner of the economy. But we should be wary of this tale, and not just because of the well-known danger of extrapolating a trend from two data points. The last time a new technology upended old certainties and changed the business world, the impact on the bottom line was small for most businesses. The digital transformation took decades to complete and, while most companies eventually posted some productivity gains from their technology investments, these were typically modest. The real story of the digital revolution was not broad-based improvement but extreme concentration. Research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the top 5% of “frontier” firms captured productivity gains more than four times larger than those of the remaining 95%. The technology was available to everyone. The gains were not. One of the results of this concentration has been that the businesses that failed to harness the new technology have been left in the dust by those that succeeded. We can expect to see the same pattern emerge with AI—not a broad-based transformation but a concentrated one in which the companies that adapt quickly will grow their market share while those that do not will fade into irrelevance. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at t