Until late last year, many of us had grown tired of the relentless chatter about AI. In fact, a WhatsApp group of industry leaders I’m part of temporarily banned AI as a topic of discussion. But since a couple of months now, everyone on the group is again talking non stop on AI. The conversation is mostly about the recent giant steps in AI development and its impact. Many believe we may be approaching a genuine tipping point in the pace of technological change.
Frontier AI leaders are calling it out as well. This February, Andrej Karpathy — co-founder of OpenAI — retired the viral term “vibe coding”. A term he coined 12 months ago to describe building software by talking to AI in plain English. His own concept was already outdated. The new reality, he says, is “agentic engineering” — humans directing AI agents that do the heavy lifting, in production, not in demos. When the people building AI can’t keep their own vocabulary current for twelve months, any enterprise AI strategy older than a quarter is already stale. And it’s not just smarter LLM showing up every month — it’s entirely new architectures, frameworks, and tools reshaping what’s possible faster than most organisations can track. In a recent interview, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, expressed his frustration with what he called the “asymmetry” between how fast AI is advancing and how little society is aware of it. I see this asymmetry play out inside enterprises — among business and technology leaders alike.
I suspect most senior IT leaders reading this will say their strategy is current. They’ve run pilots, set up a CoE, built governance, partnered with vendors. But they need to introspect, how much of that is real transformation vs theatre —a feeling of progress while the ground underneath shifts at a pace that phased roadmaps simply cannot match.AI natives are moving at a rapid pace, difficult for others to comprehend. A fast growing, mid size software company’s CEO mentioned that 80% of code is written by AI in their company. They have redefined the roles of their developers. A marketing head of a new age consumer company mentioned to me that they have already automated their marketing content pipelines and customer journeys orchestrations. He can’t stop raving about the efficiency gains he is witnessing. These aren’t experiments — they’re operating realities. And the people behind them are adopting AI capabilities as fast as they emerge.
Key reason behind this widening gap goes beyond the usual suspects of legacy tech and change resistance. It’s a comprehension gap. If your AI understanding comes primarily from enterprise vendor roadmaps and consulting frameworks, you’re getting a curated, filtered view of what’s possible. The AI ecosystem – models, agentic frameworks, tools, architectures — led by frontier AI firms and open-source communities is evolving at a pace that no quarterly business review can capture.I have one piece of advice for every technology and business leader: build something with AI. It may sound uncomfortable, but get your hands dirty — build an app, an automated workflow, an insightful analysis of a messy dataset or even make a predictive model with AI’s help. A few weeks ago, upon receiving a similar advice, I built an immersive AI spiritual companion grounded in Indian philosophy, just by prompting and iterating. What surprised me wasn’t the speed or agent autonomy — but how it shattered assumptions of IT delivery that I had carried for 2 decades. Even a few hours of building will recalibrate your instincts more than a year of strategy reviews.
The real divide in the next two years will not be between companies that “use AI” and those that don’t. It will be between leaders who understand AI through briefings and those who understand it through building.
One group will believe they are prepared. The other will know how unprepared everyone still is.
The author is Abhinav Kashyap, CIO & GCC Leadership.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCIO does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCIO shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.
