With AI, solution delivery goes vertical
The orderly linear process for delivering solutions is officially obsolete. 5 Implications to get ahead of ASAP.
The shift from horizontal to vertical solution delivery: understand this and you'll be fine...
If you are in a regulated or legacy company you are used to delivering solutions and managing your initiatives via a linear horizontal processes:
- Recognize a business need
- Design and deliver/buy/implement a solution
- Inevitably, discover that - during the 4-12 months required for Steps 1-2 - the world has moved on, and relevance now demands something better.
Something like this:
Previous status-quo—moving from idea to delivery to value realization—followed this controlled linear horizontal process. Until now, most companies could get away with putting those new demands a backlog for the next planning or budget cycle (Not a safe bet going forward).
Initiatives flowed through sequential gates for funding, architecture, security, testing, and operational readiness. Each gate was staffed by specialists who expected work to arrive in a steady, first-in/first-out queue, and were empowered to create backlogs extending months or even years whenever demand exceeded capacity.
Managers were expected to gatekeep scarce resources- and the scarcest of all these resources were the developers and cloud engineers who write code and implemented solutions.
New ideas for initiatives were expected to wait their turn in line, for an orderly intake process, project charge codes and the assignment of scarce resources to do the work, of course assuming these resources where actually available to do the work. If they were not available then the project was put on hold until later.
In 2026, this approach is obsolete.
Introducing vertical delivery
AI coding and design tools have dramatically compressed the idea-to-execution cycle. Instead of a slow, horizontal march through gated reviews, the process increasingly looks vertical: multiple viable solutions being simultaneously built, tested, and iterated in parallel by small teams—or even individuals—all using AI-augmented development tools:
Where the old model forced idea holders to wait in line for scarce software vendors or development capacity, the new reality enables rapid experimentation and solution creation upfront. AI coding tools have literally deleted scarcity from software development.
The primary constraint is no longer “can we fund the implementation?” but whether governance, review, and value-realization models can keep pace with the implementation that is already happening.
The bottleneck now is not development - its selection. Which of these deserve further investment?
Kind of like the startup world.
Instead of working thru business requirements documents and program kickoff PowerPoints, enterprise project teams are now deluged with working demos and MVPs all waiting to be cleared for take-off. Some of which already may have business customers using them. Which ones go first? Which ones have the strongest business cases? Who will own and operate them?
This is going to have a curious and perhaps unexpected effect on organizations:
- We previously thought AI would drive a need to upskill our developers. But the good developers on your team have already upskilled themselves. (Ask them what they built at home, that they couldn't build at work.)
- Instead, we need to upskill our business leaders, so they are not perpetually stuck articulating business requirements from past eras. AI will force business organizations to become active managers who have intellectual ownership, not just ownership in title, of the operations over which they preside. Both the current business operations, but most importantly the future versions of those operations - that will be required sooner than we think.
This is how you prepare leaders to be ready to vet the abundant sets of solutions being generated by AI empowered creators in their organizations, and select the solutions that will bring the best competitive advantages.
The era of the leader as professional check writer to vendors and consultants is officially over. Leaders will no longer be able to get by with:
- Delegating thinking to consultants
- Delegating work to contractors
- Delegating problems to vendors
AI will force organizational leaders to become active managers who can translate business needs into inputs that AI agents and systems will immediately output solutions to. Which will immediately require expertise to vet, refine and use.
Its time to re-center leadership on intellectual ownership and co-creation
Every senior leader must be able to:
- explain in detail how their area works today
- describe how it must work next
- work alongside developers help build AI generated solutions that move rapidly toward "how it must work next" and do so in a way that is safe, secure and cost effective.
Leaders that can't or won't do this, are putting their organizations at risk.
Going forward, most companies - even the big regulated comfortable ones - won't have margins to tolerate passive delegation-driven management. Leaders are going to have to regain intellectual ownership of their business areas and be the active managers, troubleshooters and problem solvers, working alongside tech partners to rapidly make things better.
The old way was much more comfortable. We always had someone else to blame. High costs? Yeah that vendor's expensive. We'll bring that up in the next quarterly review. Things moving too slow? Yeah well we have a new SOW and you know how the contracting process takes forever. Poor outcomes? Those IT folks.
These kinds of accountability diffusers have left the building.
The previous generation of business technology gave us a linear and horizontal delivery model that optimized for scarcity and backlogs. AI driven development is now bring a new model: Vertical delivery. Vertical delivery optimizes for abundance and speed. AI doesn’t remove the need for leadership. But it does remove the excuses for not leading.
The exciting prospect is the opportunity to blur the line between business and IT and bring everyone together to work as co-creators. Multi-disciplinary teams bringing their respective skills and expertise to ensure rapidly built and refined solutions that are reliable, safe, secure and deliver high value advantage.