42% of Executives Say AI Is Tearing Their Company Apart. Here Is What They Are Missing.

The most striking statistic in enterprise AI this year is not about capability. It is about people. In one survey of senior leaders, 42% of C-suite executives said AI adoption is actively tearing their company apart (Writer, 2026). Not slowing it or disappointing it. Tearing it apart. When close to half of a peer group reaches for that language, the problem has stopped being technological and become human.

The conventional reading blames pace. Leadership pushed AI faster than the organisation could absorb, and the strain shows. True, but incomplete. In my research across 6,000 executive leaders, the deeper fracture is not about speed. It is about trust, and trust is the one variable no deployment plan ever budgets for.

The mechanism nobody tracks

Here is what is actually happening. AI adoption forces a rapid and visible reallocation of decision authority, and every reallocation is a quiet referendum on who is trusted. When a chief executive routes a judgement through a model that a division head used to make, the message received is not efficiency. It is displacement. When teams watch analysis they once owned handed to a system, they do not read progress. They read a verdict on their value. The technology is merely the occasion. What is being spent, at speed and with nobody tracking the balance, is relationship capital: the accumulated trust that holds an institution together when it comes under strain.

I worked with a leadership team in Singapore that looked, on every dashboard, like an AI success story. Output was up and cycle times were down. Yet the meetings had curdled. People were more productive and less candid, quicker to deliver and slower to disagree. When I traced it back, the cause was not the technology itself. It was that authority had been reassigned across the team without anyone naming it out loud, and the people who had quietly lost ground had drawn their own conclusions. The tools had worked. The trust had not survived them.

Govern the trust

This is why the rift shows up at the top first. Executives feel it acutely because they can see the authority moving and cannot always see where it has landed. The result is a leadership team more productive on paper and less aligned in the room, which is precisely the condition that tears companies apart from the inside.

The instinct is to fix it with change management and better internal communications. Useful, but they treat the symptom. The cause is that trust is being spent as though it were free, by leaders who would never dream of treating financial capital that way.

My recommendation is singular. Govern the trust, not just the technology. Before the next wave of AI is deployed, name explicitly whose authority each system is absorbing, and have that conversation with those people directly, in person, before the system goes live. AI adoption fails as a human event long before it fails as a technical one. The leaders who hold their institutions together will be the ones who spent relationship capital deliberately, rather than discovering too late that it was already gone.

References

• Writer (2026). AI in the Enterprise Survey: C-Suite Alignment and Adoption.
• Rinne, A. (2026). Commentary on social offloading and workplace relationships. Fortune.
• Barker, K. (2026). Hidden Power: How Boards and CEOs Win the AI Era: Human Judgement, Cognitive Agency & Relationship Capital. Amplify.