Budgeting your change capacity

The question with AI tools isn't whether to adopt, it's how much change capacity to spend and where.

Vintage-style comic advert for an "AI Feature release Whack-a-Mole" arcade game, with moles labelled skills, Agent Swarms, MCP, A2A and Memory

"The only people who can keep up with AI product rate of change are the unemployed."

Saw that on X the other week and it's been rattling around my head since. The pace really is unrelenting, and the labs ship faster than any of us can properly absorb.

So the question isn't really whether to adopt. It's how much of your change capacity you spend, and where you point it.

Take any single change. A new tool, a new model, a new feature. Two things are moving over its life. How stable it is, which climbs as it stops breaking under you. And how much value you actually get from adopting at that particular moment, which isn't a straight line at all, it's a curve.

  • Adopt at the bleeding edge and the value is low, because it's brilliant and broken in roughly equal measure, and you're paying full price for the instability
  • Adopt just as it stabilizes and the value peaks. The churn is behind you, it holds still long enough that you can build on it, and you're still early enough to have an edge
  • Adopt once it's established and everyone else has it too, and the value drops off again. Safe and stable, but you've paid for that with your lost edge over the competition

Then the bit I think gets missed. This isn't one decision you make for the whole org and then live with. Manage it as a blend so your change capacity budget isn't spent on 1 type of change alone.

Something like: 15 percent of your change capacity pioneering the bleeding edge, because you need scouts out there finding the thing that turns into a winning bet. 65 percent on the stuff that's stabilizing, where the value concentrates. 20 percent holding the proven core steady so the lights stay on. I'm not going to pretend those numbers are science, they're roughly where I've landed today, tomorrow who knows and I'd expect them to move a lot depending on what business you're in.

Get the mix wrong in the obvious direction, all in on the bleeding edge because standing still feels like losing, and your average value just collapses. You pay for instability everywhere and compound nothing. It becomes an exhausting whack-a-mole of new features every day.

The teams I see getting somewhere with this aren't necessarily the fastest movers, they're the ones who worked out they had a budget in the first place.

Curious whether anyone is doing this deliberately, and what your split looks like. Or whether 15/65/20 is miles off for your world.

First posted on LinkedIn.