How Do We Move?

I'm Tony Uphoff, and this is Uphoff on Media. I've spent 35 years running B2B media, marketing, and technology businesses. Now I'm watching agentic AI rewrite the rules for all of them, and I'm here to help you think through what that actually means for operators, investors, and executives who live in this space. Every episode draws from my Substack, where I publish twice a week. New podcast episodes drop every week on Apple and Spotify. Okay, let's get to work. This episode is titled, How Do We Move? The Mandate or Wait Debate Is the Wrong Conversation. Here's a field-tested framework for moving forward with agentic AI with clarity and without chaos. My post, The AI Layoff Myth, generated a ton of discussion on the blog, on LinkedIn, and in private conversations with operators and executives across the industry. That response pointed directly to the question I'm being asked most in my advisory practice right now. This post is my answer and the framework I built around it. How do we move? That question comes up in nearly every conversation I have with founders, CEOs, executives, and investors in B2B media, marketing, and technology right now. Agentic AI is the context. The answers cluster into 2 camps. The first camp has committed. They are mandating adoption, setting deadlines, measuring usage. The second camp is interested but cautious. They're watching, waiting, gathering information before making a move. Both camps are making the same mistake. The phase problem. In 1962, a sociologist named Everett Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations, a landmark study of how technologies actually move through organizations. Rogers wasn't interested in which companies adopted first. He was interested in why adoptions fail. His finding? They fail because leaders misidentify which phase they're in and manage accordingly. Rogers mapped 5 phases every meaningful technology moves through inside an organization: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. Each phase requires different leadership behavior. Skip one and the implementation collapses regardless of how good the technology is or how much budget is behind it. The mandate camp is running implementation plays before their organizations have completed persuasion. Compliance isn't adoption. People follow mandates and wait them out. The wait-and-see camp has convinced themselves that accumulating knowledge is the same as strategy. It isn't. Knowledge without structured experimentation is just informed inaction. Additive versus substitutive. Every prior technology wave B2B executives have navigated was additive. Cloud computing made existing infrastructure cheaper. SaaS made existing workflows faster. Programmatic made existing media buys more efficient. Mobile extended existing experiences to a new screen. Additive technologies reward the fast follower. You can watch others absorb the implementation costs, learn from their mistakes, and move when the path is clearer. The workflows you're augmenting will still be there when you arrive. Agentic AI is substitutive. It doesn't augment workflows, it replaces them. The research workflow, the content production workflow, the lead qualification workflow, the procurement analysis workflow. These are not getting faster or cheaper. They're being rebuilt from different starting assumptions. In a substitutive cycle, the fast follower strategy breaks down. By the time the wait-and-see executive is ready to move, the workflow they intended to augment no longer exists in its prior form. The organizational muscle memory built around that workflow is a liability, not an asset. This is what's different. Not the technology itself. Executives have managed technology transitions before. The substitutive nature of the shift is what changes the strategic calculus. Trialability, the argument against waiting. Rogers identified trialability as one of the strongest predictors of adoption velocity. The easier it is to experiment with the technology on a limited basis before Full commitment the faster it moves through an organization. Agentic AI has near zero trial cost right now. That is the fact the wait-and-see camp is underweighting. You do not need a platform decision, a vendor contract, or a change management initiative to begin. Here is where to start. Pick one workflow, not a strategy, one specific bounded workflow that your team runs repeatedly. A weekly report, a competitive brief, a content outline, a prospect research summary. Scope matters. Broad experiments produce ambiguous results. Run it in parallel. Have your team complete the workflow the existing way and with an agentic tool simultaneously for 30 days. You're not replacing anything yet. You're generating comparable data. Measure what actually changes, not Sentiment, time to completion, output quality as evaluated by the person who normally does the work, and error rate. These 3 metrics will tell you whether substitution is real in your specific context. And expand from evidence. Once workflow becomes— one workflow becomes 2, 2 becomes a workflow audit, a workflow audit becomes a genuine adoption roadmap. Phase aware, sequence grounded in your organization's actual experience rather than vendor promises or competitor anxiety. This is not a technology project. It's an operational experiment. The cost of running it is minimal. The cost of not running it compounds. The real question, how do we move? The answer isn't mandate and it isn't wait. Roger spent a career documenting what actually works— structured experimentation, phase-aware leadership, and honest measurement. The organizations that navigate this transition well won't be the ones that move fastest or most cautiously. They'll, they'll be the ones that move deliberately and started sooner than felt comfortable. The workflow you're waiting to augment is already being rebuilt somewhere else. That's it for this episode of Uphoff on Media podcast. If this was useful, please rate the podcast, and if so inclined, write a quick review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other executives and operators find the show, and I read every one of them. Thanks very much. Back at it next week.