The fast and the foundational: Execution drift

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The drift dilemma: Speed up with AI, and cracks in your company’s foundation start to show. Get too cautious, and risk falling behind. The solution? A stronger foundation with Smartsheet.

Businesses have a need for speed to stay competitive, but before going pedal to the metal, a safety check is necessary.

AI provided the acceleration companies needed, but that rapid ramp-up means whatever process is already in place runs at a much faster rate. If the foundation that process is built on isn’t solid, that means cracks will form quicker, too.

That’s called execution drift, and if it gets out of hand, businesses could crash. No one wants that, so let’s buckle up, grab the wheel, and help you turn things around.

But before we hit the gas, let’s make sure we know which way we’re going.

Mapping it out

There’s no steering away from execution drift if you’re not entirely sure what it is. So let’s lay down some foundational knowledge.

Execution drift is the growing gap between strategy and execution. Think of it like drawing something from memory. No matter how clear the image might be in your head, details could get lost, things may not translate, and the finished product can look a lot different than the actual idea.

In a workplace, that gap exists between what leadership intends and what actually happens on the ground. If they don’t match up, expect unhappy leadership. This isn’t a new problem, either. In fact, PMI’s research found that stakeholders consider only 48% of projects fully successful, while 40% fall into a gray zone and 12% are outright failures. PMI frames this around the delivered value, but it points to the same underlying pattern.

When a company grows, reorganizes, replaces a tool, etc., gaps naturally form between intent and execution. The bigger the changes made, the more these gaps can appear. AI was a really big change.

While AI isn’t responsible for execution drift, it can compound broken or unstable foundations. AI introduces faster production, but if the foundations have issues, it just means more (pricey) mistakes get pumped out.

Costly confusion

With everyone on the same page of what execution drift is, we can speak a little more about where it shows up and how it gets so costly.

Day to day, execution drift shows up as manual translation work. That can look like chasing status updates across multiple tools, discovering two teams worked off different versions of the same plan because an update never fully propagated, or building exactly what a brief specified, only to find out the reasoning behind it changed two handoffs upstream and nobody updated what got passed down.

This game of corporate telephone is never fun. Worse than that, it forces teams to repeat the same monotonous work over and over, with very little payoff. Those repetitious processes can also chip away at engagement.

According to Gallup, disengagement and misalignment costs US businesses an estimated $450b–$550b a year in lost productivity. All the AI agents and tokens in the world can’t make up for that kind of loss. Even when leaders deploy AI, without one accurate, real-time view of what’s happening, they can’t move with confidence.

A smarter way

But all is not lost. There are ways to shore up your foundation to help close the gap.

It’s all about connected visibility. If that sounds familiar, you likely already saw our article with Smartsheet. Their MCP integration is designed to let AI talk and act directly with your work tools. Rather than disjointed AI tools repeating the same work in silos, Smartsheet connects them to live project data so AI can read, update, and act on it without manual handoffs.

That allows for your human teams to do the strategic kind of work you hired them for. When they’re not stuck in the weeds like that, they can zoom out for a more bird’s-eye view to help your company grow.

The good news: None of this requires a full rebuild, just a connected foundation. That’s where Smartsheet comes in.