Over the course of my career, I've watched a lot of technology land in large organizations. The pattern is usually the same. The technology arrives, consultants explain it, leadership schedules a strategy session, a working group forms, a pilot gets approved, 18+ months later we are live in production.

Today feels different. What I'm watching right now is more about the race. Oddly, nobody can quite name what they're racing toward and nobody wants to find out what happens if they finish last. You can sense the urgency. Not in press releases but in how decisions are getting made.

A year ago, I'd have said the kind of adoption I'm seeing today was still three years away. The technology continues to move fast. That part I expected. What I didn't expect was that change management at scale would speed up to match it. Large organizations are being tested to absorb change at this pace. Keeping up with what these tools can actually do, week to week, is genuinely hard. The decisions getting made aren't necessarily wrong. They just feel like decisions made to avoid being last more than decisions made to do this the right way, because there is certainly real value here.

Companies appear to be responding in two ways. Some are building internally. That tends to be the slower path. It requires hiring, training, governance, infrastructure, and a tolerance for moving at the pace your own organization can actually move. Some don't have all of that, so they turn to third parties to move faster. Harvey for legal. Glean for enterprise search. Hebbia for research workflows. There are hundreds of these now and the good ones are genuinely good. They're specialized in ways the general-purpose tools aren't yet. They've spent years building workflows, integrations, and guardrails for a specific job. For a lot of teams, that depth is the reason to buy.

It's also worth knowing what you're actually paying for. Most of these products are wrappers. Built on top of an AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), packaging the underlying capability into a workflow and reselling access as a service. You pay the vendor. The vendor pays for Tokens. The buyer rarely touches the technology directly, which means the buyer also doesn't develop much understanding of what's actually doing the work.

That tradeoff used to be straightforward. You gave up understanding in exchange for a more polished product. The AI providers are now starting to change the second half of that equation. Claude tools and add-ons are showing up directly in design work, legal work, code, and desktop task automation. These companies that used to sit one layer back are now building the products on top too. And living inside one provider's ecosystem is starting to look meaningfully different from living across multiple wrappers. This is also part of what makes building internally worth the patience it requires. A team that builds directly on a provider's platform inherits that same interconnection, plus the understanding that comes from doing the work themselves.

None of this means the specialized tools are going away. Harvey isn't getting displaced by Claude in legal work next quarter. But the calculus is shifting, which could be problematic if your company is already halfway through the race.

I don't think every decision made while running this race was a bad one, but I do think they were familiar. Some companies know how to buy software and benefit from working with vendors. The difficulty is understanding a good decision from a fast one.