On December 27, 2025, Andrej Karpathy—a co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla—posted something that should concern every business leader paying attention:
“I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored… I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue.”
This is one of the most technically capable people in the field. And he's saying he can't keep up. Not because the tools aren't there—because his own habits haven't caught up to what's possible.
If that's true for him, what's happening inside your organization?
The Gap Nobody Talks About
Ninety percent of companies report investing in AI. Fewer than 40% report meaningful bottom-line impact. They bought the seats. Ran the workshops. Set up the pilot programs. And their people are still doing most of the work the old way.
The instinct is to blame the technology—maybe the tools aren't ready, maybe we picked the wrong vendor, maybe we need more training. But there's a pattern here that has nothing to do with the technology, and it shows up in almost every engagement we take on.
Dave Gray describes it precisely in Liminal Thinking (2017). He tells a story about a grocery chain that launched online ordering. The technology worked. Leadership backed it. The strategy was sound. Months later, the project was dead in the water.
Store managers kept raising concerns. Logistics. Reliability. Storage. A hundred reasonable objections. Every one of them sounded like a legitimate business concern.
The real problem? Managers were compensated on in-store sales. Online orders would shrink their paychecks. But nobody could say that out loud. So instead of naming the real issue, they found a hundred ways to stall.
Gray's point isn't that the managers were dishonest. It's that beliefs operate below the surface. People don't resist change because they've decided to. They resist it structurally—through habits, workarounds, and reasonable-sounding objections that protect a version of reality that no longer exists.
Your Version of the Grocery Store Problem
Your COO says the team “isn't ready.” Your sales manager says “clients prefer the human touch.” Your operations lead says “the data isn't clean enough.”
These might all be true. They might also be the grocery store problem.
The words “liminal” and “limit” share the same Latin root. Every belief that helps someone navigate their workday also draws a boundary around what they think is possible. And you can't see the boundary from inside it.
Here's what we see with clients: the people who seem most resistant to AI tools are often the ones whose current expertise is most threatened by them. The resistance isn't laziness or stubbornness. It's self-preservation. And it's invisible—even to them.
Before You Buy More Licenses
Before your next AI investment—whether that's more licenses, a new platform, or another round of training—ask these three questions:
1. What couldn't AI do six months ago that it can do now—and are we still acting on the old limitation?
The capabilities shift every quarter. If your team's mental model of “what AI can handle” was set during last year's training, it's already wrong.
2. Where are we reviewing AI output out of habit rather than necessity?
There's a difference between quality control and a comfort ritual. One adds value. The other adds hours. Most teams can't tell the difference because they've never tested the assumption.
3. Is there something about our current workflow that we're protecting—not because it's better, but because changing it feels like a loss?
This is the grocery store question. The answer is almost always yes. And the person who knows the answer usually can't say it out loud.
If the answers are vague, that's the signal. The problem isn't that your team needs more tools. It's that nobody has audited the beliefs that are quietly preventing them from using the ones they already have.
What We Do About It
This is the work we do at Guthrie Blackwell & Co. Not selling you more technology. Not running another training your team will forget in two weeks. We help you find the invisible walls—the structural beliefs, the misaligned incentives, the unexamined habits—before you spend money trying to climb over them.
Because the walls you can't see are the ones that cost you the most.
Geoff Price
Guthrie Blackwell & Co. LLC
If any of this sounds familiar, let's have a conversation.
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