A manager quoted in a recent Harvard Business Review piece put the moment plainly: "Every 30 minutes, someone creates something I have to look at." Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy call it what it is: AI has made individual output faster than most management systems were ever built to handle. Employees can draft, build, and launch at a pace that didn't exist two years ago. That's a genuinely good problem. It also means the constraint on a growing business has moved.
Fosslien and Duffy's argument is straightforward: when AI lets people execute ideas faster, the manager reviewing and approving that work becomes the new limiting factor, not because they're doing anything wrong, but because the systems around them were built for a slower pace. Their recommendation isn't more oversight. It's less of the wrong kind: managers set the strategic direction and the priorities up front, then get out of the way of execution, instead of reviewing every output one at a time.
That's the right fix at the team level. It's also a preview of a bigger question every founder should be asking.
If a single manager can become the bottleneck for one team's AI-accelerated output, the same thing is happening in parallel across every function a founder runs: sales drafting proposals in a fraction of the time, ops automating workflows that used to take a full-time person, finance building models that would have taken a week. Each team is finding its own pace, its own tools, and its own shortcuts, usually without much coordination with the others.
Most founders have a rough sense that this is happening. Few have a clear picture of how. And that gap is where AI's advantage either compounds or evaporates: 83% of business owners expect AI's impact on their business to grow significantly over the next few years, but fewer than 1 in 3 have an actionable strategy behind it. The speed is already here. The direction usually isn't.
The fix HBR describes for managers is the same fix that applies to founders, just one altitude higher. Set the direction. Clarify where AI should be focused and why. Build the decision rights so teams can move fast without every output routing back to the top. And put in place the visibility to actually know how each function is using AI today, not how leadership assumes they are.
That visibility is the part most businesses skip. A founder who can name which teams have genuinely changed how they work, which have barely touched their AI tools, and which have built workarounds nobody signed off on is in a fundamentally stronger position than one who's simply hoping it's going well. Direction without visibility is a guess. Visibility without direction is just data. Together, they're what turns individual speed into company-wide advantage.
AI has already made your teams faster. That part of the work is done, and it's worth recognizing as a real win. The opportunity in front of most growing companies now isn't more AI. It's the strategy, governance, and visibility that let that speed compound instead of scatter. The businesses that pull ahead from here won't be the ones with the most AI tools. They'll be the ones whose leadership actually knows how work gets done now, and has built the direction to match.
If you're not sure how your teams are actually using AI day to day, or where the gap between activity and results is hiding, let's talk about building that visibility.
Sources: Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom (Harvard Business Review, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, May 2026)