This quote about athletic departments "still waiting to see ROI from their [AI] investments" doesn’t surprise me. Frankly because, AI adoption in sports has mostly been a high-cost & low-reward effort... for two main reasons: 1) Using AI to replace the wrong things. AI should support human judgment and creativity, not replace it. So the backlash against replacing SIDs, writers, and graphic designers with AI (most of this article), IMO, is largely warranted. 2) Thinking that buying an enterprise Claude subscription, or having IT turn on Copilot in the M365 Portal, counts as "adopting AI." It doesn't. After doing 1 & 2, and seeing no results or backlash or both, Departments turn to what they love: ~ Consultants ~ (or familiar software incumbants) Who see $$$ in selling AI consulting or software add-ons. This compounds the issue: slapping AI onto legacy software still is not AI adoption. The real opportunity is using AI to get more valuable work done with the people you already have. But that part is hard, because it requires: • organizing your data so these tools can actually use it • connecting AI to systems where it actually *does work*, beyond writing blogs or emails • letting data actually drive decisions--including challenging what’s already been decided But once you do that... you'd start asking much harder questions about the department itself. Why does this process exist? How should responsibilities change when work that used to take a week takes an afternoon? And who actually needs to be involved? The hard questions. TL;DR this article doesn’t surprise me. Too many departments are throwing AI at the wrong problems: replacing the work people value while leaving the processes that waste their time (the real opportunity) untouched. A proper implementation forces them to rethink how they operate. And I think a lot of departments still haven’t reckoned with how much that might have to change.