Last week’s 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've 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 two camps.
The first camp has committed. They are mandating adoption, setting deadlines, measuring usage. The second camp is interested but cautious. They are 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 five 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 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 are 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 a 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 are not replacing anything yet. You are 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 three metrics will tell you whether substitution is real in your specific context.
* Expand from evidence. One workflow becomes two. Two becomes a workflow audit. A workflow audit becomes a genuine adoption roadmap: phase-aware, sequenced, grounded in your organization’s actual experience rather than vendor promises or competitor anxiety.
This is not a technology project. It is 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.
Rogers 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 moved fastest or most cautiously. They’ll be the ones that moved deliberately, and started sooner than felt comfortable.
The workflow you’re waiting to augment is already being rebuilt somewhere else.
The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted by myself.
