During Newsweek’s Dec. 1 webinar “How Is AI Reshaping Business Strategy?,” one moment stood out amid the panel’s broader conversation about strategy and organizational change. It came when Gopi Kallayil, a leading AI and digital transformation thought leader, described a question he often poses to groups, to co-panelist Suraj Srinivasan, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School: Would you trust your life with AI? Would you trust your children’s lives with AI?
“Almost nobody raises their hands,” he said.
Then he pointed to what he sees around him every day in San Francisco and Los Angeles: cities full of people stepping into autonomous vehicles without hesitation. “Everywhere, I see people happily getting into self-driving cars. … They’ve exceeded more than 10 million rides,” he said. “It is remarkable… Nobody’s even paying attention. It’s become so normalized so quickly. It is astounding.”
The contrast landed immediately. In a discussion full of examples—new consumer behaviors, agentic search, multimodal discovery—that moment cut to the real dynamic unfolding in the market. People are already trusting AI with decisions that matter, even if they would never describe it that way.
The shift isn’t theoretical. It’s happening in the places they live, the products they use and the choices they make without thinking.
Throughout the conversation, Srinivasan returned to that idea: consumer adoption is moving faster than enterprise readiness. People are already using AI for product discovery, for solving everyday problems, for comparing options across brands and even for operating the products they buy. They are more comfortable experimenting than many companies expect, and the expectations they bring into those interactions are shaped by whatever service is furthest ahead.
Kallayil underscored how quickly that shift is occurring. In previous eras, he said, major technology cycles unfolded over years. Today, it’s over quarters or even weeks.
Consumers adopt new behaviors almost instantly—typing longer, more natural queries, using images as inputs, pointing a camera at something and expecting an answer. The pattern repeats across categories. Someone accustomed to tracking their Uber in real time wonders why their airline can’t provide the same visibility. A person using multimodal search for shopping starts expecting similar intelligence everywhere else.
As those expectations rise, both speakers noted, organizations feel the pressure to adjust systems, data and interfaces so information is easier for AI-powered tools to retrieve. Kallayil offered the example of a hair salon that doesn’t answer the phone when an AI agent calls for prices—the system can’t return an answer, and the business simply disappears from the results. The same dynamic applies elsewhere: if an agent can’t access the basic information it needs, the consumer will never see the option.
The webinar moved through several examples of what that future looks like: shopping agents that search for gifts on Amazon, multimodal tools that evaluate an outfit and recommend shoes, AI models that plan vacations across flights, hotels and activities and even tools that interpret appliance interfaces more effectively than the manuals themselves.
Each example pushed the conversation back toward the same theme. Consumers are already relying on these capabilities. They’re doing it quickly. And their adoption curve is shaping the environment in which companies must operate in.
Srinivasan emphasized that as decision-making accelerates on the consumer side, organizational decision-making will need to accelerate with it. Experimentation, iteration and learning cycles will have to compress in response to how people are now navigating products and services. Companies that continue planning on slower rhythms will increasingly find themselves reacting to expectations that have already changed.
For Kallayil, the core question for leadership is simple: If you rebuilt your business from scratch, knowing what these tools can already do, what would you design differently? What would the consumer experience look like from the first moment of discovery to the last moment of use? And how would you prepare for the next change in behavior, not just the last one?
The moment that framed the conversation—the mismatch between what people say about AI and how they actually behave—offered a clear window into where things are headed. Trust isn’t forming in abstract terms. It’s forming hour by hour in the experiences consumers have with AI tools they find useful, intuitive and reliable.
For companies watching the market shift in real time, that’s the signal worth paying attention to.
Request Reprint & LicensingSubmit CorrectionView Editorial & AI Guidelines
Add Newsweek as a preferred source on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search.Recommended For You
Newsweek.AIAI to Eliminate ‘Fear’, Not Teachers, From Language Learning6 min read
ScienceNew NATO Allies’ Arctic Laser Base Will Counter Russia and China5 min read
Newsweek.AIAI’s Future Still Depends on Human Judgment, Scholar Says5 min read
Newsweek.AIAI Impact: The Limits of Scale10 min read
Newsweek.AIWorkera is Enabling Skills-Based Talent Strategies Using AI5 min read
NewsThe Day AI Got My Clients7 min readTrending
FloridaAmazon Driver Sees Food Left for Stray Cats—Ring Cam Captures What He Does3 min read
ImmigrationGreen Card Update: New Changes for Holders in December6 min read
NWSWinter Storm Warning as 8 Inches of Snow to Hit North and Midwest3 min read
Black FridayBlack Friday Spending Raises Eyebrows Over US Economy8 min read
WeatherWinter Storm Warning As 13 Inches of Snow To Strike: ‘Extreme Caution’3 min read
