The secret truth is corporate America is moving too slow on AI. Some of it is caution and some is terrible recruitment

The case for slowing AI down got turbocharged last week when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned citing AI's potential to end humanity. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then posted a nearly 4,000 word essay arguing for an AI slowdown. In a rare bout of unity, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others quickly endorsed the idea of slowing down. Despite these calls, government intervention to slow down AI developments looks unlikely for now.

While an active debate on both sides of this topic gains steam, there is another kind of risk that is not getting discussed: companies that move too slowly in grasping the implications of AI will likely see their own form of a slow down. That is why outside of frontier AI labs, the rest of corporate America needs to speed up.

Some of corporate America's slowness in adopting AI is because the talent pool who know what they are doing is still small. This argues for upskilling and reskilling to meet demand and fill emerging AI job categories. However, some of the slowness can be attributed to a cautious approach or even self-protection. But those who are covering themselves need to know they have competitors that won't wait.

I help the executives and boards of companies from numerous industries grapple with the opportunities and risks of AI. Everyday I see their urgency to understand and get ahead with AI in industries as varied as defense, food distribution, reinsurance, utilities, manufacturing, consumer products, retail, engineering, and international banking.

American companies are under tremendous pressure to accelerate their AI adoption. AI now ranks as the top issue on public company board agendas for 65% of public company directors in a recent survey . And that makes sense. AI is evolving fast and beginning to show the outlines of cross-industry disruption. Corporate America understands the stakes, and they are not waiting for federal regulators to help (or hinder) them.

For now, the powers that be are leaving the big questions about AI to the companies themselves. Corporate America knows they are the ones who need to grapple with AI. The worry is that given how fast AI is moving, very few corporate leaders know exactly how to approach the defining issue of our time.

Only 22% of S&P 500 companies and 6% of the Russell 3000 disclosed board oversight of AI while only 29% of leaders say they have the right expertise on their boards to advise on AI implementation. Without major federal regulations setting the guardrails for how companies adopt AI, the big decisions about how AI is being deployed are being made in the boardroom, not the halls of Congress.