Almost Every Organisation Is Using AI. Almost None Are Leading With It.
Fikun Aluko, an AI, Cybersecurity and Technology Leader and Chevening Scholar, delivered a presentation at the 6th International AI in Business Summit on the 1st of June, 2026, challenging business leaders on why most organisations are using AI but almost none are leading with it.
Speaking to founders, investors, engineers, researchers, and enterprise leaders, he opened with a provocation.
"Almost every organisation is using AI. Almost none are leading with it," he said.
McKinsey research found 88% of organisations are using AI, yet only 6% qualify as genuine high performers.¹ The WRITER 2026 Enterprise AI Survey found 75% of executives admit their AI strategy is more for show than actual guidance, and 48% called AI adoption a massive disappointment.²
A Leadership Problem, Not a Technology Problem
Drawing on his experience leading enterprise-wide AI adoption across 5 business divisions at a leading EMEA business services firm, Aluko said the most critical work happened before a single system went live.
"The leadership team believed AI would make their operations faster. My job was to change that model entirely," he said. Getting that conversation right produced significant gains across all 5 divisions.
He identified 3 wrong mental models: treating AI as a productivity tool, as a magic wand to fix what is organisationally broken, and as a risk to manage while competitors move. Deloitte found 37% of organisations at the surface level of the first model.³ The right model, he argued, is AI as organisational infrastructure, owned at board level and inseparable from business strategy.
"The 6% have not found better technology," he said. "They have made a different foundational decision about what the technology is."
Governance as a Competitive Advantage
From his work building integrated risk and cybersecurity control frameworks aligned to ISMS, BCMS, SOC 2, NIS2, the AI Act, and DORA, Aluko challenged the assumption that governance slows deployment.
"What I observed was the opposite," he said. "The anxiety driving reckless speed dissolved once governance was embedded. In its place was permission to move faster."
Goldman Sachs embedded controls before any user logged in and achieved 46,500 employees on their AI platform, 20%+ productivity gains, and a 30% reduction in client onboarding time.⁴ Rite Aid did the opposite, deploying AI facial recognition with no governance framework, resulting in FTC enforcement action and a 5-year ban in December 2023.⁵ The AI was wrong, and no one had the authority to override it. For Nigerian and African enterprises, any business with European clients or data flows touching GDPR-regulated jurisdictions is already inside the EU AI Act sphere of influence, with fines up to €35 million or 7% of global turnover.⁶
The Human Layer Where Strategies Die
Coaching 78 engineers and 50 engineering managers at Multiverse, the UK top-ranked EdTech company, Aluko said the most consistent gap was not knowledge but the distance between what people know and what they can do when the problem is live. DataCamp 2026 research found 82% of leaders say they provide AI training, yet 59% still report a critical skills gap.⁷ The problem is not investment. It is design.
Leading the Beyond Limits Tech Startup Fellowship for 3 years across 30 countries reinforced the finding. The founders who struggled most were experienced operators who could not translate what AI could do into decisions about what their organisations should do.
"That translation sits in the manager layer and it is where most enterprise AI training never reaches," he said. Organisations with mature programmes report 42% strong ROI compared to 21% overall.⁷
Closing with a 12-question diagnostic spanning leadership mindset, governance, and human capability, Aluko said what struck him was not the scores but the silence. Most leaders could not name the human being accountable for their most consequential AI decisions.
"That single gap predicts where AI strategies stall more reliably than any other," he said.
"The difference between the 6% and the 88% was never going to be technology," he concluded. "It was always going to be the quality of 1 decision about what AI fundamentally is. The organisations that make that decision clearly do not just use AI better. They become a different kind of organisation entirely. That is the distance between adoption and leadership. And it is available to any organisation willing to close it."
_Fikun Aluko is an AI, Cybersecurity and Technology Leader, Chevening Scholar, and Fellow of the African Leadership Initiative. He delivered a presentation on "From AI Strategy to AI Reality" at the AI in Business Summit in Amsterdam in June 2026. With over a decade of experience spanning Deloitte, pcl., NITDA Nigeria, Beyond Limits, Hikestack, Skillharvest, and Multiverse UK, he has led technology innovation across enterprises, governments, and startup ecosystems in over 30 countries. He is founder of Hikestack, an innovation studio operating across the EMEA region, and can be reached at alukofikunayomi@gmail.com and linkedin.com/in/aluko-fikunayomi_
Citations
McKinsey and Company, "The State of AI," 2025. Survey of 1,993 respondents across 105 countries. mckinsey.com
WRITER, "AI Adoption in the Enterprise," 2026. Survey of 2,400 respondents across the US, UK, Ireland, Benelux, France, and Germany. writer.com
Deloitte AI Institute, "State of AI in the Enterprise: The Untapped Edge," 2026. Survey of 3,235 business and technology leaders across 24 countries. deloitte.com
Goldman Sachs, GS AI Platform deployment data, reported across multiple institutional disclosures, June 2025. goldmansachs.com
Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Order Prohibits Rite Aid from Using AI Facial Recognition Surveillance for Five Years," December 19, 2023. ftc.gov
European Parliament and Council of the European Union, "Regulation on Artificial Intelligence (EU AI Act)," Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 99. eur-lex.europa.eu
DataCamp, "State of Data and AI Literacy Report," 2026. Survey of 517 US and UK business leaders conducted in partnership with YouGov, February 2026. datacamp.com
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