Why Most AI Initiatives Fail with Paul Shirer

Despite massive investment in AI, many organizations are struggling to generate meaningful business impact. Why? According to Paul Shirer, most companies are treating AI as a tooling problem when it’s really a workflow and adoption problem.

In this episode, hosts Michael Hartmann sit down with Paul, Founder & CEO of Infinite Ideas AI and Director of AI & GTM Technology at Bridge Partners. Together, they discussed where AI adoption goes wrong, how leaders should think about workflow design and decision-making, and what it actually takes to move beyond experimentation toward measurable value.

In this episode:

• Why AI is a workflow and adoption problem, not a tooling problem
• What’s really causing the high failure rate of AI initiatives
• How to tell useful AI adoption apart from “agent sprawl”
• Why Paul moved away from end-to-end automated workflows, and what changed his mind
• What a connected workspace looks like in practice
• Balancing flexibility and governance when every team wants a custom solution
• Why the data layer matters even more in an AI-driven environment

Whether you’re being asked to justify AI investments or trying to turn experimentation into real results, this is a practical conversation for operators closing the gap between AI hype and AI impact.

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