What If We Don’t Move Fast Enough? A Leader’s Guide to Avoiding AI Obsolescence
How composable thinking and cross-functional strategy keep you ahead in an AI-driven market and enable you to move smart, not scared.
The anxiety isn’t just in your head: In 2025, AI is no longer a moonshot
Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek have overtaken ChatGPT as the most downloaded app in the U.S., shaking global markets and wiping billions off U.S. tech stocks. DeepSeek’s open-source models are being adopted across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, even by major institutions like HSBC and Saudi Aramco, and are offered by American tech giants including AWS, Microsoft, and Google.
Meanwhile, Wall Street giants like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are embedding AI across their operations, automating tasks from IPO filings to client service. JPMorgan, for example, has rolled out AI to over 200,000 employees. Adobe’s stock was downgraded due to competition from generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway, which are challenging Adobe’s long-held market dominance.
These are clear signals that AI is now a key competitive advantage, and more importantly, that the companies that hesitate risk becoming case studies in obsolescence.
What Falling Behind Actually Looks Like
The fear of being left behind by AI-fueled competitors is about something fundamental: the erosion of your core business value. And falling behind isn’t always a sudden collapse. It often shows up as slow, systemic decay.
Margins begin to shrink as competitors automate processes, streamline operations, and shift human effort toward higher-value tasks. Your teams, meanwhile, are still burning time on manual processes that could and should have been phased out years ago. Campaigns stall not because the creative is bad, but because the personalization and targeting capabilities aren’t keeping pace with what AI-powered competitors are delivering in real time.
Engineers—some of your highest-value talent—become too bogged down with maintenance to experiment. Innovation turns into an aspiration instead of a core competency. And while you’re trying to align the roadmap for next year, your competitors are already A/B testing new channels, features, and customer experiences in real time.
Talent notices. When top employees feel they can’t do their best work, they look elsewhere. When internal tools feel five years behind, it’s harder to recruit the people who will drive the next five years of growth. The cost of inaction isn’t just lost revenue— it’s a slow loss of your organization’s ability to adapt.
The Hidden Bottlenecks You Need to Surface
AI is the fuel that powers your engine, but when your engine is rusty, brittle, or misaligned with where you want to go, AI can’t magically fix things. Those same issues will present the same roadblocks your teams already struggle with.
So figure out where the cracks in the engine are.
Start with your architecture: Legacy systems built for another era resist integration. They weren’t designed to be flexible, and as a result, data often lives in silos, inaccessible or out of sync across departments. The marketing team has one view of the customer, the service team another, and the product team is left guessing. These silos kill the kind of fast, unified decision-making AI thrives on.
Workflow rigidity is another silent drag on momentum. If launching a new product or campaign requires three teams, six approvals, and a dozen manual updates, AI can’t help you. The system itself is too slow to adapt.
Add to that vendor lock-in. Many enterprises are deeply entrenched in contracts and tools that don't interoperate easily. Switching is hard. But staying locked in while the market evolves around you is even harder in the long run, so start assessing where, when, and how you can move past those lock-ins today. It may take longer than you’d like, but that’s all the more reason to start now.
And perhaps most importantly, there’s often a misalignment between business and tech teams. Leaders want to move fast, but the underlying systems—and the incentives that drive teams—aren’t designed for speed or shared outcomes. When business goals and technical capabilities aren’t in sync, AI initiatives flounder. Find the common ground, work together to identify the advantages and the challenges you’ll face in reaching them.
To make real progress, you have to get honest about these obstacles. Naming them is the first step toward removing them.
How Leaders Can Get Ahead Without a Full Rebuild
The good news? You don’t need to rip everything out and start over. In fact, trying to do so is often a recipe for organizational paralysis. What you need is a shift in architectural thinking—one that prioritizes adaptability, modularity, and iteration.
Start by investing in composable systems. These architectures allow you to plug in new capabilities without tearing down the old ones. APIs become the connective tissue between services. Decoupling your data ensures it’s accessible and reusable, even as interfaces and touchpoints evolve.
That kind of flexibility makes it possible to pursue near-term wins without overcommitting to massive transformation. You can start by enhancing customer-facing experiences—adding AI-generated product recommendations, deploying automated customer support, or improving search and discovery—all while building toward a more flexible future.
Leaders should also carve out space for experimentation. That means budget, yes, but also time, talent, and a culture that rewards exploration. AI isn’t just a toolset; it’s a way of working. If teams aren’t allowed to try, fail, and iterate, they won’t learn how to use it effectively.
And perhaps most critically, reframe the conversation. AI readiness isn’t a tech initiative! It’s a business agility mandate. It’s about your organization’s ability to respond to changing conditions, test new ideas, and scale what works. That’s not something you can delegate to IT. It’s something the entire leadership team must champion.
Your Next Strategic Moves
If you’re serious about staying relevant—and positioning your organization to thrive—you need to take focused, cross-functional action. These aren’t moonshots. They’re tangible moves you can make in the next 30–90 days to build momentum and confidence.
1. Establish an AI & Operational Readiness Council
Form a dedicated internal group that spans departments and focuses on aligning your business goals with emerging AI capabilities. This is a working team that identifies opportunities, removes blockers, and drives accountability.
- Who to include: It will vary a bit across organizations, but generally should include senior leaders from technology, marketing, operations, finance, and HR.
- Size: Aim for a manageable group of 8–12 people with decision-making authority.
- Mandate: Define success metrics, pilot use cases, and integrate AI goals into strategic planning.
2. Rethink KPIs to Prioritize Adaptability
Traditional metrics like efficiency or uptime still matter, but they don’t tell you whether your org is ready to evolve. Start tracking indicators like:
- Time to deploy new features
- Speed from insight to action
- Volume of AI-assisted tasks completed
- Model performance on real-world business inputs
- Employee usage and trust in AI tooling
Adaptability isn’t just a capability—it’s a mindset, and your metrics should reflect that.
3. Audit Your Tech and Talent Stack
You can’t move fast if your infrastructure isn’t built for speed. Conduct a clear-eyed audit of your current platforms, processes, and skill sets.
- Technology: Is your stack modular? Can you plug in new tools or capabilities without rewriting everything? Where are the points of friction?
- Talent: Do your teams have the AI fluency they need? If not, what will it take to get them there— training, new hires, or a reorg?
Treat this audit as a strategic exercise, not a housekeeping task. It’s the foundation for informed investment and sustainable change.
The stakes are real. But this isn’t a panic moment, it’s a leadership moment. The organizations that act with focus, pragmatism, and adaptability will shape the AI future, not just react to it. Composability gives you a way to move without breaking. AI gives you the power to move smarter. Together, they’re your playbook for relevance. Now’s the time to start using it.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.