FEBRUARY 17, 2026 | ISSUE #7
Databricks' 2026 State of AI Agents report just dropped a number worth paying attention to: companies that implemented AI governance pushed 12x more projects to production.
Not 12% more. 12x.
That number tells you something important. The bottleneck in enterprise AI is not capability. It is coordination.
12x More projects to production with structured AI governance
30+ AI initiatives at the average Fortune 500 company
I talk to enterprise leaders every week who are investing heavily in AI. Most of them have made real progress. They have the models. They have the data teams. They have executive buy-in and a growing list of initiatives in motion across the business.
But here's what I keep hearing, especially from commercial leaders in financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing: the individual initiatives are not the problem. The problem is that no one has a clear picture of how all of those initiatives connect, compete for resources, or compound into something bigger than the sum of their parts.
They don't have an AI project problem. They have an AI portfolio problem.
The average Fortune 500 company now has dozens of AI initiatives moving across business units. Each one has its own stakeholders, compliance requirements, risk profile, and timeline. When you are running three pilots, you can coordinate by email. When you are running thirty, you can’t.
The cost is not just inefficiency. It is strategic blindness on the commercial side.
You can't see which initiatives are stalled in legal, which ones are redundant, and which ones have the highest revenue upside. That is not a governance problem. That is a growth problem.
Three frontier models launched in six days in December. Claude Cowork shipped in January. Opus 4.6 and OpenAI Frontier dropped early this month. The capability keeps compounding. The coordination has not.
Every new capability release generates a new wave of use cases across the business. Marketing sees opportunities. Operations sees opportunities. Finance, legal, product, customer experience, all of them are identifying ways to put AI to work. The backlog is not shrinking. It’s growing faster than most organizations can evaluate, approve, and deploy.
The enterprises getting this right have figured out something the rest haven't: you can’t manage an AI portfolio with the same tools you use to manage AI projects.
A project needs a timeline, a budget, and an owner. A portfolio needs visibility across every initiative, the ability to see which ones are competing for the same resources, and a structured way to move the highest-impact bets through review without letting the rest stall in limbo.
The companies pushing 12x more projects to production are not moving faster because they have better AI talent. They are moving faster because they have a system. One place where every initiative is visible. One process for getting from idea to approved to deployed. One way to see, at any moment, where the bottlenecks are and what is being left on the table.
Most enterprises don’t have that. They have email threads, quarterly review committees, and a growing spreadsheet that is already out of date.
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK
Look at your AI initiatives across the business. Not the individual projects. The full picture. How many are in flight? How many are stalled in review? How many are redundant? If you cannot answer those questions from a single view, you have a portfolio problem.
The 6% don't manage AI projects. They manage AI portfolios.
NEW FROM THE PORTFOLIO
AlignAI built the operating system for enterprise AI portfolio management. One platform where program managers run structured review and approval, keep stakeholders aligned with automated guardrails, and get real-time visibility across every initiative. Customers like Bread Financial and Geisinger are seeing 10x program productivity and $50M in annual savings. Learn more →
Could you brief your CEO on every AI initiative in your company right now?
Reach out. I'd love to think it through with you.
Talk Tuesday,
Jason Hauer
CEO, HauerX Holdings
jason@hauerX.com
