3 Ways AI Can Free Organizations from Legacy Workflows – Executive Summary
HBR, by Graham Kenny and Ganna Pogrebna, published May 2026
1. Summary
"3 Ways AI Can Free Organizations from Legacy Workflows" (HBR, 2026) argues that the brake on competitiveness is the weight of outdated capabilities. Legacy workflows persist, old assumptions guide decisions, and "the way we've always done it" shapes strategy, which in a market reshaped by real-time data and automation erodes competitiveness. The authors call this failure to let go organizational forgetting, and they treat it as both underappreciated and increasingly expensive. They then trace three places where the past keeps its grip. Legacy performance metrics distort priorities and reinforce behaviors that once drove success but now work against it. Reliance on historical patterns leads teams to misread present conditions. Past practices that stay embedded in systems and processes crowd out experimentation and adaptation.
2. Relevance for CIOs
For CIOs, this points the AI agenda toward subtraction. Start with your own KPIs: if they don't map to current business outcomes, they're legacy noise, and AI aimed at the wrong metric makes you miss the point faster. The same logic applies to forecasting and prioritization. Modernization should ask which workflows deserve to survive at all, not just which ones get a new update. The opportunity is that AI can now support in doing this diagnostic work, surfacing where a process contradicts its own goal or where an assumption breaks under data.
3. Thoughts from Sonny Claussen (CEO Bee360) about this Article
This landed for Sonny because Bee360 is rebuilding their website from a static WordPress setup into something that adapts dynamically to every market it operates in, and Sonny keeps having to correct people, including himself, when it gets described as a design project. It is a workflow redesign project, and the design is only what you see at the end of it. The line he keeps coming back to is that companies are stuck because they are running AI on top of workflows that stopped fitting years ago, and the question for any leader should not be what to add next but what they are willing to leave behind.