Three things Frontier Firms understand about AI—and you should too

AI is moving from experimentation to enterprise scale. The companies out ahead—Frontier Firms—are human-led and agent-operated. They weave AI into the fabric of their organizations to pioneer new operating models, reinvent functions, and prioritize ongoing skill development at every level.

For most organizations, the challenge with AI isn’t adopting tools—it’s with fundamentally changing how people work.  

“Redesigning with AI doesn’t start with technology. It starts with understanding how work actually gets done,” says Katy George, Corporate Vice President of Workforce Transformation at Microsoft. “The uncomfortable truth is that most enterprise AI projects never deliver real impact. Too many get stuck in pilot purgatory: shiny demos that don’t scale, don’t stick, and don’t matter.” 

Without a clear approach for connecting AI to work processes and reshaping how employees get things done, AI activity won’t translate into measurable impact. Here are three key insights that Frontier Firms understand about AI—and that your organization needs to master next. 

1. Make the invisible visible

For years, information work unfolded out of sight, making it difficult to measure or improve. Unlike the output on an assembly line, you can’t watch someone negotiate a contract or draft a product launch strategy. (Well, you can, but you’ll miss the real action.) And you can’t reimagine what you can’t see. That’s why Frontier Firms start by illuminating every corner of the workflow. They chart each step, pinpoint where tasks begin, where delays creep in, and what those slowdowns cost. Suddenly, an insurance adjuster’s day becomes a series of traceable units of productivity. Negotiations that once vanished into email threads now surface as data: who responded when, which terms took longest, and where talks stalled. Frustrations that used to be accepted as part of the job are now visible, specific problems ready to be solved. 

Take Ramp, a leading financial operations platform. By tracing all the handoffs within financial processes, like expense management, accounts payable, and procurement, they uncovered tiny delays that added up to weeks. Then they deployed agents to match receipts and double-check approvals. The result? The company processes five million receipts every month, saving 30,000 hours and closing books at record speed. Mapping workflows and breaking down complex processes into actionable steps showed exactly where AI could deliver transformative impact. 

2. Think of AI as infrastructure

Too many companies treat AI like innovation theater—something to showcase in press releases and investor calls. Frontier Firms do it differently: they build AI into core processes and change the way their people work with technology to drive business performance. This changes the conversation from “Where can we add automation?” to “How do we design with AI?” Only then can organizations start compounding returns, speeding up cycles, and uncovering new capabilities at AI pace. 
 
LinkedIn is rebuilding its product development process to make AI a part of everyday work. Instead of siloed teams handing projects off, they’re creating full-stack pods where product, design, and engineering work together from idea to launch. AI is embedded in these workflows—an internal agent called Mae is fixing more than a third of developer builds automatically, so using AI is just part of the job. People still set the vision, decide priorities, and check quality at every stage, but they also take on broader responsibilities across research, design, coding, testing, and release. The result is faster delivery and a culture where AI drives real business performance instead of sitting on the sidelines. 

3. The frontier is a practice, not a place

There’s no finish line for AI adoption. Frontier Firms operate in perpetual beta, treating every process as a hypothesis and every improvement as fuel for the next. But scaling up isn’t a free-for-all. Success demands structured experimentation—carefully orchestrated tests, reliable metrics, and rigorous governance to keep innovation responsible and risk in check. Guardrails matter. So do skills: teams learn to design, run, and evaluate experiments systematically, turning curiosity into exponential value. 

At one financial services institution, the CEO set a clear goal—use AI to improve client service—and got senior leaders on board by showing how much it mattered to their business. Teams mapped every step of their core processes, broke big tasks into smaller ones, and found where automation could help. Roles changed too: junior employees used AI to speed up prep, while senior employees focused on client conversations. Training and incentives reinforced the project, and progress was tracked openly. It was a “show your work” approach to rebuilding, with clear steps and accountability leading the way.

There’s no playbook for AI today. It’s a new frontier. But patterns are emerging. Frontier Firms don’t layer AI on top of existing work; they rethink how work gets done from the foundation up. They uncover hidden bottlenecks, track what matters, and build systems that learn from evidence, not assumptions. This is how AI stops being a flashy add-on and becomes an engine of agility and sustainable growth. 

The question isn’t whether AI will reshape how your company operates—it already is. The question is whether you’ll lead your organization to pull ahead or let others define what’s possible.