Charles HudsonFounder and Managing Partner, Precursor Ventures

Is AI transformation just a pipe dream?

16 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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Charles Hudson argues that meaningful enterprise AI transformation requires more than distributing tools (e.g., ChatGPT) or running demos; it demands reimagining workflows and processes, which is slow and often involves early failures. CEOs remain committed and will iterate on mistakes; Hudson estimates visible, organization-wide impact may take until the back half of this decade.

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And in many ways, I feel like all of this failure and gnashing of teeth is a necessary part of transformation. Because if it was just as easy as giving everybody in your company ChatGPT and stepping back, this wouldn't be that revolutionary. The revolutionary work is going to come in enterprise transformation, which requires not just giving everybody AI tools, or not just doing AI show and tell every week, but actually digging into workflows and processes that you have and reimagining them. And anyone who sold the enterprise knows that's not something you do overnight. So this idea that just because we had the ChatGPT moment, that in a year these big lumbering enterprises were going to magically transform to take advantage of AI, I think was always a pipe dream. But it's a pipe dream in some ways that has fueled all this enthusiasm. Because I think the CEOs that I talk to of large organizations, they know that they have to get this right eventually. And just because these initial attempts have failed doesn't mean they're going to quit. They're going to try to learn from their mistakes. And I think it could be the back half of this decade, which I know is a lot longer than my peers think, the back half of this decade before people can really, really point to this stuff working across their organization in ways that are easy to imagine but hard to see today.