There is a gap in how most businesses are run that AI will either amplify or destroy.
Most leaders focus primarily on financials. And financials are real — they reflect value creation. But they’re a lagging, partial picture. They tell you where you’ve been. What they don’t capture is the sustainability and resilience of the value you’re creating: the depth of your customer relationships, the knowledge living in your best people’s heads, the culture that makes your team want to stay and perform, the governance that lets decisions get made without everything flowing through you.
According to Ocean Tomo’s Intangible Asset Market Value Study, these relationships, knowledge, culture, and governance assets — what economists call intangible capitals — now account for roughly 90% of the market value of S&P 500 companies. And for most leaders, intangible capital is almost entirely undocumented and invisible in the systems they use to run their business.
AI is arriving into that invisibility. And depending on what you do next, it will either widen the gap or close it, making what you see more clear or more confusing.
The question before the question
Someone on my email list asked me this recently: How do I use AI responsibly in a client-based business without losing authenticity, trust, and the personal connection?
That’s the right question. And almost nobody is asking it.
Most leaders are asking “how do I adopt AI?” or “which tools should I use?” or “how do I keep up?” Those are reasonable questions. But they all skip a more fundamental one: does my organization have enough visibility into how it actually creates value to know what’s worth amplifying?
There’s a difference between an organization that’s oriented toward creating value and one that’s caught in its own daily urgency — and most leaders have never had to distinguish between the two before now.
You’ve seen this kind of organization. Maybe you’re running it. The day starts with the most urgent email. The week is shaped by whoever is loudest. The strategic priorities exist in a document somewhere, but the actual decisions get made in hallways and Slack messages and the five minutes before a call. The founder knows everything — not because they want to, but because nothing moves without them and everyone knows it. The team is talented and tired. There’s constant motion and not enough real progress.
This is what happens when 90% of value creation is invisible. Without clear visibility into how the business actually creates value — the relationships, the knowledge, the culture, the governance — everything feels equally urgent. It’s hard to agree on what matters most. Decisions get made by whoever is loudest rather than by what actually drives value. That’s not a talent problem or a technology problem. It’s a visibility problem.
This confusion is exactly what AI will amplify.
The confusion gets processed faster. The urgency multiplies. The volume of outputs increases. The founder is now reviewing more, reacting to more, making more decisions at higher speed — because the AI is feeding the machine, not changing what the machine runs on. Same pattern, higher velocity.
This is what a multiplier does. It doesn’t ask what the organization is orienting from. It amplifies whatever is already there.
So before the question of how to use AI — there’s a prior question worth sitting with.
What is my organization actually orienting from?
The missing piece
We have a practice of calling things “capital” only when we can count them. Cash is capital. Equipment is capital. Physical infrastructure is capital. These are tangible — you can put them on a balance sheet, depreciate them, sell them.
But the same logic can apply to assets you can’t easily count. Your customer relationships generate returns when you invest in them and erode when you neglect them. The knowledge in your organization compounds when you develop it and walks out the door when you don’t. Your culture either attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones, or does the reverse. Your governance — how decisions actually get made, who has authority — either creates clarity that scales or creates confusion that costs you.
Customer relationships, knowledge, culture, governance — these assets behave like capital. They grow with investment. They decay with neglect. They generate the conditions that produce your financial results. We just haven’t been in the practice of treating them that way.
The intangible capitals — customer relationships, employee relationships, supplier relationships, community, environment, knowledge, strategic governance — are the actual engine of your business. The financial capital on your balance sheet is the result after the intangibles have done their work. Financials are downstream, not upstream.
Intangible capital is the missing piece. The 90% that’s been there all along, quietly building or eroding your business value, while everyone is looking for profits.
Most leaders haven’t looked at intangibles directly. Not because they’re not intelligent — they are. But the accounting systems we grew up with made it easy to ignore what couldn’t be put on a balance sheet.
The place to start is looking more closely at the value your intangibles are already creating. Before you can measure anything, you have to name what’s actually there. The relationships between your key people, between your company and its customers, between your team and their sense of purpose — these are either deepening or eroding value right now. Naming them is how the invisible becomes visible. And most of what you’ll find has been there all along — built through every conversation, every decision, every hire, every client relationship you’ve ever had. Beyond conflict, the real connection that matters.
Some of what you’ll find can’t be fully quantified — and that’s not a failure of rigor, it’s the nature of humans. The trust in a room, the ease of a hard conversation, the felt sense that a team is genuinely aligned and cares about each other — these influence everything and resist precise measurement. They can be noticed, named, and deliberately tended. That’s enough to start.
And some intangibles can be measured. Customer relationship health. Knowledge transfer and documentation. Decision flow and empowerment. The clarity of your value creation process across the whole organization. These can be tracked, improved against defined targets, and made legible to everyone inside the business — and to anyone evaluating it from outside.
When intangible capital is visible, named, tended, and where possible measured, your organization runs better because everyone can see what they’re building. And your value becomes demonstrable rather than assumed.
What AI amplifies — and where it genuinely helps
An organization tracking the 10% while the 90% remains invisible will use AI the same way — amplifying the part of the business that’s already visible, while the part that creates the most value stays a mystery. Worse, moving fast without a line of sight into how intangible capitals actually create value actively erodes them. The customer relationship that goes untended because everyone’s too busy. The knowledge that never gets documented because there’s always something more urgent. The culture that quietly shifts from trust to compliance while nobody’s looking — which feels efficient until the day you need the organization to run without you, and it can’t.
Bring AI into an organization that knows how it creates value — where knowledge is documented, customer relationships are understood and tracked, the team has clarity about what success looks like and who owns what — and something shifts. AI can propagate knowledge that used to live in one person’s head across the whole organization. It can surface patterns in customer relationships that would take months to see otherwise. It can capture what’s working — the actual practices, decisions, and ways of operating that generate value — and make them available to everyone who needs them.
Use AI to capture and amplify what’s working. Not to invent a new way of doing things — to make explicit what your best people already know, and put it in a form that everyone can use.
What AI cannot do is build your customer relationships. It cannot create the trust your team has in each other. It cannot develop the leadership clarity that allows a founder to genuinely step back — to build systems, trust the people around them, and let the organization lead itself. Those are human capacities. They require humans choosing to develop them.
The leaders who will use AI well are the ones who know what they’re amplifying. They have enough clarity about how their organization creates value that they can point AI at the right things and keep the human in the loop where it counts. Seeing clearly, choosing deliberately, moving with intention — that’s what leadership looks like in the age of AI.
What this looks like in practice
Tracy McNeil became CEO of Materna — a medical device company building products for women’s health — in early 2020. She had three weeks before COVID shut down the world.
I was there for the day before everything changed. I flew back to Raleigh from San Francisco on March 13th, 2020. I will be direct: I had a panic attack on that flight. Not because of the virus. Because I had bet on this company, this founder, this vision — and the world was falling apart.
By the time the plane landed, I was clear. I’d moved through the fear instead of trying to make it go away. And what I saw was this: the companies that would come through this moment were the ones with something real — real relationships with investors who believed in the mission, real clarity about the value they were creating, real leadership at the center.
Tracy had all of that. Within weeks, she’d turned the COVID moment into a catalyst. Within months, she found a $20 million investor — a woman who had been looking for five years for exactly this kind of company, this kind of founder.
What Tracy had built wasn’t just a product. It was a culture, a clarity of purpose, a quality of leadership that made serious investors want in. The intangible capitals were strong. The external chaos tested them and they held.
The organizations that will come through the AI moment the same way aren’t the ones that move fastest. They’re the ones that know, deeply know, what they’re building.
The move to make right now
AI is not coming. It’s here. Waiting is a real risk — the pace of adoption in the market is not going to accommodate a leisurely preparation schedule.
But the leaders who navigate the opportunity of AI well will do something that looks counterintuitive from the outside. While adopting the tools — and yes, adopt them because the pace is real — they will also take time to get clear on how their organization actually creates value.
That means naming the supplier and customer relationships that are core to the business. Getting the knowledge out of their own head — and their best people’s heads — so that others have the context and details to make good decisions. Looking honestly at how decisions actually flow and whether the team is genuinely empowered or subtly waiting for permission. Building a picture of the intangible operating system so that it’s visible, documented, and alive — not in a consultant’s report that nobody reads, but in the daily way the organization understands itself.
Then they use AI to amplify that.
AI in an organization with a clear, documented value creation system compresses the time it takes to scale what’s working. Not everything becomes visible — but enough to make much better decisions much faster. The organizations that do this build businesses that are more valuable, more scalable, and more resilient — not because of the AI tools they’re using, but because of what they built before they turned those tools on.
At IAMX, we’ve spent years mapping how organizations actually create value — across industries, at different stages of growth, with leaders who are building to scale and leaders who are building toward an exit. We know what intangible capital looks like when it’s strong and what it looks like when it’s quietly eroding value. Working with Insights7 and Mary Adams — author of Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st-Century Organization and the researcher who pioneered making these assets visible and measurable — we help leaders document their intangible operating system in a way their team owns and AI can actually run on.
That foundation is what makes a business genuinely ready to scale. It’s also what commands a premium when the time comes to exit.
If you want to know what this looks like for your business, reach out. We’re working with a small group of leaders on exactly this right now.
Which part will AI amplify?
The customer relationships you’ve built — are they documented and tended, or assumed? The knowledge in your best people’s heads — is it transferable, or does it leave with them? The leadership in your organization — is it distributed, or bottlenecked? How your business creates value — is it visible and owned by your team, or does it live somewhere in the back of your mind?
These are what AI will amplify. They’re also what determines the sustainability and resilience of your business — whether you’re planning to scale it, sell it, or simply show up next quarter with more clarity and less chaos.
The leaders who get there first won’t be the ones who adopted the most tools. They’ll be the ones who knew what they were amplifying.
Karen Tax is the founder of IAMX, a leadership and organizational development firm that helps leaders build businesses that run on something more than urgency. She works at the intersection of human development, intangible capital, and value creation — partnering with Insights7 and Mary Adams, author of Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st-Century Organization, to help organizations see, develop, and scale what they’ve built.
This article was written with AI. Claude helped research, organize, and sharpen ideas developed over thirty years of working inside organizations. The frameworks, the stories, the point of view — those are Karen’s. The speed and organization — that’s AI. Which is exactly the point.
