Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

Misalignment at Speed

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

A friend sent me a William Blair research report this week that characterized enterprise AI adoption as "a mile wide and an inch deep."

Just about every organization has started to use AI tools in some fashion. But there's little orchestration of how those tools are actually used. And very little alignment across the enterprise.

A 2025 MIT report suggested that 95% of enterprise Generative AI pilots failed to deliver significant ROI or move beyond experimentation. The report flags not the quality of the tools, but to strategic misalignment as the primary driver.

Of course, strategic misalignment is an age-old challenge for organizations. AI acceleration just further exposes the rift.

Hugh Derrick at eatbigfish recently pointed to Harvard Business Review research that strategic alignment is up to 3X lower than leaders think. As he put it:

"So when you layer AI-driven speed on top, you don't magically become more effective. You run the risk of getting faster at being inconsistent (and yes, you'll create a lot more 'stuff' along the way)...

"And it matters most in big, complex organizations where silos already slow everything down. When 30% of senior leaders point to silos as a root cause of productivity stagnation, and two‑thirds say their organizations are overly complex, adding more speed to a fragmented system doesn’t fix the system. It just creates more noise."

AI Agents Worked as Designed. That Was the Problem.

This morning a back page ad ran in the Wall Street Journal directing readers to a satirical memo from the future — with five of my cartoons.

The memo imagines the morning after AI agents take over and find out what it actually takes to run a business.

A wave of AI doomer reports have been predicting the collapse of enterprise software, with AI agents running businesses all on their own. ServiceNow wanted to respond — not with a white paper, but with satire. They asked me to help.

Read the full memo and see all five cartoons here.

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew in 2017. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.