The AI Reality Check I Need Your Help With

Hey there,

I'm having an identity crisis as a consultant, and I need your help.

Over the past month, I've had conversations with product leaders at companies ranging from 50-person startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. What I'm hearing doesn't match what I'm reading in Harvard Business Review and the latest industry news nor seeing in LinkedIn thought leadership posts.

The disconnect is jarring.

One CPO tells me: "Everyone's using different AI tools and we can't collaborate effectively anymore." Another shares: "Half my team won't touch AI because they're worried about making mistakes." A third confides: "We're generating so much AI content that I spend more time editing garbage than I would have spent just writing it myself."

And then, on top of all that, last week I spoke with someone who changed companies mid-way through my AI course. At his previous company: "[They were] very much anti-AI... AI was seen as a competitor... they don't use AI and were very proud of the fact that they don't use AI."

His first day at the new company? "Welcome to [the company]. Can you join this call we're having with the leadership about AI?"

Same person. Same month. Two completely opposite organizational realities.

Meanwhile, the AI transformation industrial complex keeps pumping out case studies about seamless adoption curves and universal 10x productivity gains, as if every company exists in the same alternate reality where cultural resistance doesn't exist and tool proliferation never creates chaos.

Something doesn't add up.

Either I'm talking to the wrong people, or there's a massive gap between AI adoption reality and AI adoption marketing. My guess? The truth is messier, more interesting, and infinitely more useful than either the "AI is transforming everything" narrative or the "AI is overhyped" counter-narrative.

The reality seems to be that we're living through a period of radical organizational divergence. Some companies are building AI-native cultures. Others are actively rejecting AI as a threat to their identity. Most are somewhere in the messy middle, accidentally creating coordination chaos while trying to capture productivity gains.

My challenge, however, is that I don't have enough data. I've got insights and patterns, but I don't have proof. So I'm asking for your help.

I want to understand what's actually happening inside product organizations when it comes to AI adoption. Not the sanitized case study version…not the conference presentation version…the Tuesday morning reality version where cultural resistance meets tool proliferation and somebody has to make it all work.

I've put together a short survey—three questions that should take about two minutes. These aren't multiple choice questions about your tech stack; they're open-ended questions designed to capture the nuanced reality of what you're actually experiencing.

The questions I'm asking:

1. Describe the last time AI came up in a leadership discussion at your company. What was the actual conversation—who said what, what concerns were raised, what got decided?

2. What's one thing about your team's AI usage (or lack thereof) that would surprise other product leaders?

3. If you had to explain your company's "AI culture" to a new hire on their first day, what would you tell them?

Here's my commitment to you: Everyone who completes the survey gets the full analysis of what we learn—patterns by company size, industry insights, cultural factors, and the honest truth about where product teams are actually succeeding (and struggling) with AI adoption.

No sales pitch. No "download our white paper." Just the data and insights from what I hope will be a very honest snapshot of AI adoption reality.

Why I think this matters:

If we keep pretending AI adoption is either "revolutionary transformation" or "complete chaos," we miss the opportunity to learn from the spectacular variety of what's actually happening. The messy middle—and the cultural extremes—are where the real insights live. The specific challenges you're facing right now are probably the same ones dozens of other product leaders are quietly navigating, whether they're in AI-proud or AI-resistant organizations.

Let's figure out what's real, what's working, and what's worth worrying about across the full spectrum of organizational approaches.

Take the survey here: [https://forms.gle/TZ2L8dL6xCJjzxzu8]

And if you're curious enough to participate but skeptical about sharing insights with a consultant you barely know, I get it. Email me at michael@breakapencil.com and ask me anything about my background, methodology, or what I plan to do with this data. Transparency works both ways.

Thanks for helping me get smarter about what you're actually experiencing. I have a feeling we're all going to learn something useful.

Break a Pencil,

Michael

P.S. If you know other product leaders who might have interesting perspectives on this—whether they're at AI-native companies, AI-resistant organizations, or somewhere in the complicated middle—feel free to share this with them. The more diverse the input, the more valuable the insights will be for everyone.