AI Success Starts With Teams, Not Tech

Most companies are asking the wrong question about AI.

They're debating which model to deploy, which vendor to buy into, and which tools to roll out first. Meanwhile, the real blocker is sitting in every office chair across the organization.

That's the argument Vasion CTO Corey Ercanbrack makes in his article and on a recent episode of the Vasion podcast. Having led major transformations across agile development, cloud migration, and Zero Trust security, Ercanbrack has a pattern-recognition advantage most AI commentators lack. His read on this moment is clear: AI isn't another technology shift. It's a foundational one.

During the podcast, Ercanbrack mentioned that managers and executives are more likely to use AI than individual contributors. A Gallup poll confirms this, stating that 33% of leaders frequently use AI as opposed to 16% of individual contributors. Ercanbrack ties this to people who use AI the most are those whose jobs already require getting work done through others.

His explanation cuts to the core of the problem:

"AI all of a sudden is highly used among those people who know how to get work done with other people, because it becomes a worker. It doesn't become a software, it becomes yet another worker."

For individual contributors, the majority of any organization, that mental model doesn't come naturally. And without it, AI tools get treated like slightly smarter search engines: useful in bursts, abandoned quickly.

The fix isn't more training on how to use ChatGPT. What’s required is a complete reimagining of how every employee approaches their work.

"Those individual contributors have to completely change their mindset. They have to become managers, whether they want to or not... you're going to have to be an AI manager to make this thing work."

Ercanbrack frames AI readiness around three sequential shifts and warns leaders they have roughly three years to make them.

1. The Mindset Shift

Fear is the first obstacle. Job displacement headlines dominate the conversation, and that noise makes people defensive. But Ercanbrack draws a historical parallel: workers who resisted the tractor lost ground; those who retrained as mechanics gained it. The same dynamic is playing out now.

What gets buried in the discourse is the opportunity side of the equation. As Ercanbrack puts it:

"The news doesn't talk about the hundreds of new jobs that have been created that need to be done in order to support and maintain this new imagined world of AI and humans working together."

The mindset shift isn't about accepting a threat. Recognizing that AI-native workers, those who can direct and manage digital workers, become more valuable rather than less is the real transition required.

2. Upskilling as Strategic Imperative

You can't hire your way into AI-native. There simply aren't enough qualified people, and even if there were, bringing in outside experts without upskilling your existing team creates gaps in institutional knowledge and execution.

At Vasion, that meant partnering with Utah Tech University to develop machine learning coursework, funding employee enrollment, and deploying Claude (Anthropic) broadly across the organization. But Ercanbrack is clear that tool access alone doesn't solve the problem. Structured enablement does.

The current initiative involves building templated digital workers that ship to every new employee on day one, paired with certifications and training that teach people how to manage them.

"Our objective this year is to have every single employee have at least one digital worker. I suspect we'll have lots that will have more than one digital worker, and we'll have those workers calling agents to do work."

The goal, as Ercanbrack frames it, is building judgment and not just technical proficiency.

3. Restructuring How Teams Operate

This step in the transformation causes the most friction for leadership. Traditional organizational siloes exist for good reasons: specialization, accountability, and clear ownership. But AI starts eroding the hard lines between functions.

"All of a sudden, those lines that sometimes actually get in the way and slow you down... all of a sudden start to gray a little bit. Because if I now have an agent, and my agent just can automatically talk to the marketing agent, all of a sudden, I can smooth that handoff out."

The logical endpoint is organizations structured around outcomes rather than functions. Ercanbrack goes further, predicting we'll see a one-person billion-dollar company within the foreseeable future, enabled entirely by orchestrated agents across every business function.

This shift doesn't just threaten individual contributors. It challenges leaders who've built careers on managing people and functions. The response, he argues, is the same: reimagine what you get to drive rather than defending what you've always done.

Here's where the position Vasion takes becomes particularly relevant.

AI runs on context, and a massive amount of that context in virtually every organization is locked inside physical documents and paper-based processes. Ercanbrack is direct about this:

"I don't know a single business who doesn't have to deal with some type of physical or digital documentation and paper...And in fact, when you think about AI, AI is fed on top of context, which comes from data, and a lot of that data is locked up in physical paper."

For years, the conventional wisdom was that paper was a blocker to digital transformation, something to be digitized before real progress could happen. Intelligent Print Automation from Vasion flips that logic. Rather than requiring organizations to overhaul their processes before they can go digital, IPA meets them where they already are: at the print button.

Every application has a file print function, and everyone knows how to use it. The Vasion platform intercepts that action and makes it intelligent, automatically routing documents into digital workflows, triggering signatures, redacting sensitive information for compliance, or interrogating content using AI, without requiring users to change their behavior at all.

That's a different theory of transformation entirely: one that removes the adoption barrier by building the digital layer into a behavior that's already universal.

Ercanbrack puts it plainly:

"We're going to make that print button, that print action intelligent...That all of a sudden takes print from being the blocker, to digital transformation, to being the enabler."

The three transformations Ercanbrack describes—mindset, upskilling, and restructuring—apply inside Vasion as much as they do for customers. Vasion isn't just building tools for AI-native organizations. It's becoming one. And that internal clarity about what transformation actually requires is reflected in how the platform is built: not to replace the way people work, but to make the work they're already doing exponentially more powerful.

Digital transformation doesn't have to start with a massive overhaul. Sometimes it starts with a print button.

Learn more about how the Intelligent Print Automation platform from Vasion helps organizations modernize their print infrastructure and accelerate digital transformation at vasion.com.