Something has been quietly shifting in boardrooms. Leaders are no longer asking how to innovate. They are asking where value is next.
Something has been quietly shifting in the conversations I have with leadership teams, and it has shown up in our 250 co-creators of Augmented Collaboration as well. The word "innovation" is losing its power.
People are not done with doing new things. The opposite, in fact. They care so much about getting real results that they have grown tired of a word that has come to mean the wrong thing. I want to write down what we have been hearing, what we think is replacing it, and what the shift means for any team that still describes its work as "innovation initiatives."
What leaders keep telling us about innovation
In most companies today, innovation has quietly become shorthand for unknown outcomes, projects that take years to monetize, and initiatives that feel too far away from the real business. Innovation labs that produce decks. Hackathons that produce ideas no one funds. Long-term bets that nobody can defend at the next quarterly review. Five specific complaints come up almost every week:
Projects take too long to monetize. Outcomes feel unknown and uncertain. The horizon sits too far from the next quarterly review. Innovation labs produce decks, not value. Leadership cannot defend the budgets when results are years away.
None of those complaints is new on its own. What is new is how often they all show up together, in the same conversation, from leaders who used to defend their innovation programmes proudly. The word has drifted, and they have noticed.
The question taking over the room
In those same conversations, a different question is showing up. Where is value next? It is a simpler question, and it is a more honest one. It does not assume that the answer is a new product or a new technology. It does not promise the unknown. It asks something specific and answerable.
The companies we work with and the co-creators of the book are not asking how do we innovate any more. They are asking sharper questions. What customer problem is worth solving right now? Where in our customers' work can we make a real difference? What job is our customer trying to get done, and can we help them do it better? How quickly can we turn that into value the business can see?
These are questions a leader can answer to a board. They are questions a team can answer in a month, not a year. They are questions that quietly redefine what innovation work actually is.
What AI changes about the answer
Here is the part most leaders are still working out. For the first time, AI sits at the table when teams ask these questions. It can synthesise thousands of customer conversations in an hour. It can surface patterns across industries that a human team would never see. It can simulate experiments before they are run. The leverage is real.
None of that matters if the team is still chasing novelty. AI plus a team chasing innovation theatre produces more innovation theatre, faster. AI plus a team chasing real customer problems produces value at a pace the old way could not match. The question is not whether your team has AI. The question is what your team is pointing it at.
What the book is actually about
Augmented Collaboration is not about innovation. It is about where value comes from next, and what changes when humans and AI design that value together. It is about starting every project with the customer problem, not with the idea. About understanding the jobs your customer is trying to get done, and designing your work, your team, and the AI alongside them, around solving those jobs.
If your team still describes its work as "innovation initiatives," it is worth asking what would change if those same projects were framed as "value bets on specific customer problems, accelerated by AI." Different name. Different conversation. Different result. What got us here is not going to get us there. Especially now that AI changes what "there" looks like.
Where to read more
Grab your copy of the #badversion of Augmented Collaboration, available now as a softcover and as a digital edition. The final version, with QR codes linking each tool to a live Miro template, arrives on 1 September 2026 and can be pre-ordered today. The book gives the full case for the shift, the tools the team uses to make it, and the way AI fits inside it without taking the wheel.
If your boardroom is having the same conversation we keep hearing, you are not alone. The argument behind the book is built for exactly this moment.
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