Jay Fontanini: You Cannot Skip the Stages

On the Subject of Leadership · Aug 11, 2026 · 1h 12m

Nine years of rising conversation about artificial intelligence, and a measured return that has not moved. The comfortable reading is that the technology was oversold. The uncomfortable one is that we have not yet done the work it requires of us.

For the better part of a decade the surveys have promised imminent transformation, and for the same decade the earnings impact has stayed flat. Jay Fontanini's argument is that this is not evidence of a fraud but the signature of a general-purpose technology mid-adoption — the dynamo was ready long before the factory was rebuilt around it. The…