Kotter launches AI accelerator to boost business value

Kotter has launched an AI Value Accelerator for leadership teams, aimed at companies whose artificial intelligence spending has yet to deliver business results.

The new offer is a short engagement designed to connect AI work to a company's broader business strategy. It has three stages: an AI readiness assessment, leadership sessions on vision and strategy alignment, and an AI activation roadmap.

The first phase is intended to identify existing successes and pressure points across people, processes and systems. The second focuses on aligning senior executives on assumptions, decision principles and selected use cases, while the final phase produces a documented plan with guiding principles and guardrails.

The launch comes as many large organisations continue to invest heavily in AI while struggling to demonstrate a clear return. Kotter is targeting management teams stuck in fragmented activity without a clear view of how AI should support core strategic goals.

Three-phase approach

The engagement is designed to assess an organisation's starting position and bring senior leaders to a shared view on priorities. It is also intended to identify internal influencers and likely obstacles before broader implementation begins.

Kotter described the offer as a front-end product intended to create clarity quickly. Expected outcomes include a clearer line of sight to return on investment, less spending on tools that do not match business priorities, and a path to wider deployment of targeted AI use cases.

The firm also presented the service as a response to organisational barriers that can emerge during technology rollouts. These include staff concerns about job displacement, burnout and loss of control, alongside management bottlenecks that slow adoption.

Kathy Gersch, Chief Executive Officer at Kotter, set out the company's view of the market in the launch announcement.

"The market is caught in a cycle of AI-related frenetic activity which is predominantly not creating value, with many organizations struggling to move beyond "check the box" adoption," said Kathy Gersch, Chief Executive Officer at Kotter.

She also linked rapid deployment to internal resistance and argued that AI planning should sit within broader business planning rather than exist as a separate workstream.

"Furthermore, this rapid technology deployment triggers a range of survive responses from fear of job displacement to burnout and loss of control. Our AI Value Accelerator inverts the model. We must stop trying to build isolated 'AI strategies' and instead define exactly how AI will accelerate core business strategy," Gersch said.

Adoption challenge

The launch reflects a wider debate over corporate technology spending as boards and executives seek evidence that AI projects can move beyond experimentation. Many companies have announced pilots and internal tools, but turning those efforts into measurable operational or financial gains has proved more difficult.

Kotter's approach places particular emphasis on executive alignment. This suggests the company sees leadership disagreement, unclear ownership, and inconsistent decision-making as key reasons projects stall before they scale.

The reference to the "frozen middle" also points to a familiar issue in transformation programmes: mid-level managers can become blockers when priorities are unclear or when new tools alter reporting lines, workloads or accountability. By setting principles and guardrails at the outset, Kotter is seeking to reduce that friction.

Kotter is best known for advisory work in strategy execution, organisational change and leadership development. The AI Value Accelerator extends that work into one of the largest areas of current corporate spending, arguing that the main challenge is not the technology itself but organisations' ability to adapt around it.

The engagement is intended to produce a precise roadmap for AI implementation that supports continuous learning and tangible business value.