The industry spent a decade treating institutional memory as overhead. A billion job postings later, the data points the other way—and the mechanism is the part nobody is naming: AI made judgment the scarce resource.
AI does not repair a broken organization. It executes the inefficient process faster, produces the unclear output at scale, and pursues the wrong strategy more efficiently than the organization could ever have managed alone.
Years of major incident work across fifty-plus enterprises produced one pattern that still surprises people: the technology usually wasn’t the first thing to fail. The communication was—consistently, and long before anyone was on the phone at 2am.
