# Look at the dominoes in this image. That is the most accurate representation...
Canonical: https://social-archive.org/tgroenwals/yR1J28qLov
Original URL: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gabriel-millien_look-at-the-dominoes-in-this-image-that-share-7458830514746134528-BGLH/
Author: Gabriel Millien
Platform: linkedin
## Content
Look at the dominoes in this image. That is the most accurate representation of AI ROI I have seen all year. Miss one domino, the chain stops. And most companies miss the same one. This 10-step framework from Vaibhav is sharp. Save it. Send it to your team. Then notice the pattern most readers will miss. Steps 1 through 5 are head work. Define ROI. Choose problems. Build the business case. Start small. Measure what matters. This is the part that gets the budget approved. Steps 6 through 10 are body work. Embed AI into workflows. Drive adoption. Fix bottlenecks. Scale. Optimize. This is the part that determines whether ROI ever shows up. Most enterprises are excellent at the first five. Most enterprises fail at the last five. The ROI dies somewhere between step 5 and step 7. Where the work moves from a deck to a daily workflow. Where it stops being a strategy and starts being a behavior change. Step 6 is the hardest step on this list. Embedding AI into daily workflows is not a technical problem. It is a human one. And no business case prepares an organization for it. Across the enterprise AI programs I have advised on, the chain almost always breaks at step 6. Not because the AI was wrong. Because nobody owned the workflow change. Because the incentives still rewarded the old way. Because the people doing the work were never asked what would actually help them. This is what step 6 failure looks like in practice. The pilot showed strong results. The deployment metrics held for ninety days. Then daily active users plateaued in single digits. Then someone asked why ROI never showed up. The AI was running. The work was running. They were not running together. The cost of that failure is not the AI investment. It is the eighteen months your competitors used to actually implement theirs. This is where the AI Execution Gap shows up in practice. Not at the strategy. Not at the vendor. At step 6. One question to ask before approving the next AI initiative. Who in our organization owns step 6? Not the AI team. Not the strategy team. The person with authority to change how a workflow actually runs. If you cannot name that person, the dominoes will not fall past step 7. Every time. The leaders who generate AI ROI are not the ones with the cleanest business cases. They are the ones who solved step 6 before step 1. That is why their dominoes fall. 💾 Save this for your next AI ROI conversation. ♻️ Repost so a friend in your network sees where the chain breaks. 🔔 Follow Gabriel Millien for weekly insights on closing the AI Execution Gap. Image Credit: Vaibhav Aggarwal.