There is a secret in the IT budgets of almost every large public company in the world right now.
On paper, the strategy looks sound. The CIO has signed a massive enterprise agreement, likely with Microsoft for Copilot, or perhaps Salesforce or OpenAI Enterprise. The company pays $30 to $80 per seat every month. It has rolled out the official secure tools and ticked the compliance box.
But if you walk the floor of that same company and look at what the teams who perform their best work are actually doing, you’ll probably see a different story.
The high performing teams are alt-tabbing away from their corporate-funded AI app to log into their personal ChatGPT Plus accounts or to use Perplexity on their personal phones. They are paying $20 a month out of their own pockets because the tools they use at home are faster, smarter, and less restricted than the applications offered at work.
There’s a massive divergence between corporate AI (what IT bought) and personal AI (what is actually doing the work). As a result, most leaders are flying blind because they can’t measure the right things.