We are now in the “third wave” of business —the era of adaptive processes, where firms across industries are reimagining their processes to be more flexible, faster, and adaptable to the needs of the given moment (Daugherty & Wilson, 2018). Organizations who successfully ride this ‘third wave'” adopt five crucial principles called the MELDS Framework:: “mindset, experimentation, leadership, data, and skills” (Daugherty & Wilson, 2018). 

Organizations should be aware of complacency and guard against efficiency traps. Efficiency often conflicts with resilience: lean systems may perform well until they fail badly, so it’s important to include sufficient redundancy, slack, and buffer capacity, even when these seem inefficient in the short term.

Organizations fail when they treat AI adoption as the endpoint rather than one step in a continuous strategy. Measuring success by usage rates alone—celebrating “more people using AI”—confuses the how with the what. Before deploying any AI tool, leaders must establish a pre-deployment review process that requires clear answers to all five questions before any AI tool goes live—and build ongoing monitoring to ensure the answers remain valid as systems evolve:

• What’s needed? Define the actual business problem or capability gap you’re solving.
• What’s happening? Map current workflows to understand how work and learning actually occur.
• What’s replaceable? Identify which tasks can be automated without eroding essential skills.
• What’s learned? Determine which developmental experiences must be preserved for novices.
• What’s lost? Assess what capabilities, relationships, or growth opportunities disappear with automatio

For successfull AI implimentations reframe AI as a Strategic Process, Not a Finish Line