In this 2026 talk, Marc Chabot argues that the rapid proliferation of AI and software transformation projects across enterprises is leading to catastrophic failure rates—95% of AI deployments and 88% of software projects fail—primarily due to broken enterprise planning rather than technology choices. He explains how the AI era creates a new competitive dynamic where early adopters of multi‑agent, agentic systems gain outsized leverage, while late adopters face acquisition, disappearance, or massive job loss. Chabot stresses that workers must shift from low‑leverage execution to high‑leverage roles as designers, owners, and orchestrators of agentic ecosystems. To address the planning crisis, he presents FourSquads’ AI‑native planning operating system, which guides organizations through a full planning lifecycle—from portfolio strategy to project execution—eliminating redundancy, improving decision quality, and delivering cost savings of $2‑$20 million per company and hundreds of millions in project outcomes. He concludes with a call to try the system online and consider customized pilots to accelerate AI leadership.
Chapters
It's 2026 and every company in the world's deploying AI software project, business transformation project, hundreds to thousands of projects every year in an enterprise. But failure rates are completely off the charts. 95% of AI deployments are failing. 88% of software projects fail because they don't have the right team members collaborating on the projects. More than 50% of projects don't have the right requirements. Some are going so badly that they actually risk the existence of the company. It's a huge cost. The research says that this failure is are rarely from poor execution. People didn't pick the wrong technologies and the wrong solutions, but instead the failures are from poor planning. And, you know, enterprise planning is just completely broken. You start in this planning hell, you move through collaboration chaos, execution breaks down, it's highly manual, there's missing stakeholders, multiple points of handoff failure, late surprises, low adoption. And even if you fight through this, Every plan is a, is a snowflake. Every project's a snowflake. The next plan, you're going to have to recreate everything from square one. And we're in an era where there are more and more projects being deployed across an enterprise. We're in the area today where we're hundreds to thousands of potential projects. In the near future, that's thousands to maybe several thousand every annual time period. It's a compounding problem. If enterprise planning is broken and it's leading to unacceptable failure rates over a lot more projects annually, the result is a lot of chaos. Chaos in enterprise organizations. And that's not even the real problem. The real problem— I could tell you the truth, or I could go down a comfortable journey. I'm going to start with the truth. The old model of technology adoption has been repeated time and time again with every new wave of technology. You got in early innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. But this new AI era is a lot different. Organizations, the teams, and the individuals that maximize their ability to adopt multi-agent agentic systems get such an advantage and higher leverage that it makes it almost impossible or entirely impossible for the late majority and the laggards to even catch up. Over the next 5 to 10 years, you're going to see 30 to 40% of companies get acquired, 10 to 20% of companies disappear entirely, 25 to 40% of roles made redundant, 10 to 20% of job categories entirely eliminated. And the spoils will go to the winners, these 15% of organizations that adopt AI early. Everyone else shrinks or gets absorbed. This has a big impact on the global workforce. Hundreds of millions of roles will become unnecessary and tens of millions of people will be permanently displaced. This isn't a collapse, but it's the largest white-collar labor reshaping in history. And one thing is, is that you have to realize you're not being replaced, but the version of your job that you do today that's protected you for all these years, the experience, that you have, that's what's going away. The shift isn't about you failing, but it could be about you not paying attention. Because if you pay attention, you can understand that AI needs human context, taste, ethics, and judgment. It just needs fewer of us per outcome. And the question isn't, will there be work, but how do I make the work I am doing indispensable in the agentic AI environment? So this isn't a race against AI, it's a race away from low leverage work. If your work is about executing, you need to move to ownership of work. You need to move to designer of work. You need to move to orchestrator of agentic ecosystems. So you're not late yet. You're not broken. You're not obsolete. That's not the message. The message is the world's asking more leverage from each of us. It's asking for more leverage from each of us in the work we do. And we need to learn how to deliver it if you want to become indispensable. And if enterprise planning is broken, this is an area that you can become indispensable fixing this. And that's what we do at FourSquads. We help organizations, teams, and individuals deploy the first agentic AI-native operating system designed specifically for enterprise project planning, which enables teams to plan much better and have much better impact on their organizations across the entire planning lifecycle, starting with business strategy and portfolio planning, answering the questions of what should we work on and why, moving into where we actually look at individual projects and determine is this specific project worth pursuing? We move it into do we understand the problem well enough to proceed? Are we truly ready to execute? And then finally, can delivery start with confidence? This is the planning lifecycle and FourSQL delivers this and gives you leverage at the company level to ensure that your company is prepared to accelerate its transition into AI leadership by enabling you to successfully deploy AI software business transformation initiatives at a faster pace and at a higher scale across the organization. So your organization could be a leader in the AI adoption curve. At the portfolio level, we give you leverage by helping you identify and understand the opportunity and the potential across hundreds and thousands of potential projects so that you know how to eliminate redundancy, prioritize them, and move the right ones forward to execution. At the team level, we give your team leverage in enterprise planning to enable them to orchestrate outcomes, not just coordinate coordinate activity, work, and tasks. And at the individual level, we create leverage by establishing leaders that can shape the planning outcomes and the systems and orchestrate multi-agent agentic ecosystems. That career experience is important within your current company and in any other agentic-first company that you may want to choose to work for in the future. And this, this is compounding across your organization. Outcomes are massive in the planning functions themselves, and the impact to the business in cost savings and opportunity is on the order of tens of millions to hundreds of millions every year for companies that deploy this type of system, this planning system, their organizations. We're seeing this $2 to $20 million in savings adjusting the planning function itself, hundreds of millions of impact in improved outcomes for projects. So FourSquads enables leverage inside plans. Our agentic planning operating system creates leverage across your organization, and the people and teams who lead this shift gain leverage over outcomes and become indispensable in their roles. And we encourage you to give it a try. You can try it free online right now. Go plan a project, experience the impact of multi-agent Agentic Systems. And if your team wants to double down, we're happy to engage with you and to help you deploy a pilot that's customized to your organization, specifically configured to your organization, help you train up your leaders and teams so that you can add this efficiency radically fast to your organization. Thank you.
