Org-Level Goodhart: When Teams Game AI Adoption Metrics
· 9 min read
According to one study, 95% of generative AI pilots technically succeed—and 74% of companies using generative AI still haven't shown tangible business value. That gap is not a coincidence. It's a measurement problem dressed up as a technology problem, and most organizations won't diagnose it correctly because the people doing the measuring are the same ones being measured.
This is Goodhart's Law at the organizational level: once an AI adoption metric becomes a performance target, it ceases to measure what you care about. The metric keeps going up. The underlying outcome stays flat or gets worse.
