Maine Pointe: Why your AI investment isn’t delivering and what CEOs must do next

With many leaders asking why they haven’t seen the expected ROI from AI investments, the experts at Maine Pointe say the problem isn’t in the technology itself, but in the thinking behind how AI is deployed.

Joseph Esteves, CEO of Maine Pointe, and Avik Ghosh, head of AI and product innovation, explore this challenge in depth in “Value Creation Drives AI Supply Chain Success,” a recent article published in Material Handling & Logistics.

“At first, we, like everyone, treated Gen AI as a tool layered into our existing workflows, which were designed for a world where knowledge and analytical horsepower were scarce,” says Esteves. “So we put AI into an inefficient system, and we got inefficiency out of it. We found we were just automating constraints rather than removing them.”

The article is reshaping how forward-thinking companies approach AI strategy and it has direct implications for CEOs evaluating AI consulting partners today.

The ROI Question Is the Wrong Starting Point

Every new technology gets filtered through an ROI lens. AI, Esteves and Ghosh argue, is categorically different and treating it like every other technology investment is precisely why so many initiatives underdeliver.

“The fundamental issue that needs to be prioritized is to have a value-centric mindset,” says Ghosh. “You might have a certain process, a sales process, an inventory process, and you have to ask yourself: what is the fundamental value of this process? Why does this process exist? If a company re-anchors itself on that value, AI can reimagine the whole thing.’

The companies seeing the strongest returns aren’t asking “how do we use AI?” They’re asking, “What are we actually trying to achieve?” and rebuilding from there.

What Real ROI Looks Like and When It Appears

Once constraints are removed rather than automated around, Esteves says the business impact becomes rapid and compounding. “Speed to decisions is going to be lightning fast. Companies will experience cycle time compressions. You’re going to see risks you didn’t see before. People are going to be able to scale improvements very quickly.”

But he is direct about what unlocks this: “Gen AI’s ROI is not capped by technology’s potential. Now we have an abundance of intelligence. It’s capped by how quickly organizations can evolve the way their people work.”

For CEOs, this reframe matters. The investment isn’t just in software or systems. It’s in redesigning how work gets done, retraining existing talent, and creating roles that have never existed before.

“Imagine if you had all that time to be more strategic and innovative,” says Esteves. “Once you come to terms with what this technology can do, it’s like the next level of Maslow’s hierarchy. It can actually help me think about strategy better than I could alone.”

A New Model for Leadership in an AI-Driven Organization

The implications extend beyond operations and into organizational structure itself. Ghosh describes a leadership model gaining traction among high-performing companies, one that inverts the traditional hierarchy.

“I have seen this idea of democratization work when the org chart is turned upside down. Instead of the CEO at the top, that position is now at the bottom. The philosophy moves from who reports to you, to who do you support. The root of the tree supplies nutrients and water to the leaves, the employees, who can now grow in their own different ways.”

Esteves puts it plainly: “We have to democratize innovation. Get it in everyone’s hands. Give everyone the chance to solve problems, because when you scale that way, you can have hundreds, thousands solving problems that the top of the organization didn’t even know existed.”

Why This Matters Now

For supply chain leaders navigating tariffs, geopolitical volatility, and shifting trade policy, the timing is urgent. Ghosh points to a concrete example: “Maybe you would have spent a year doing a strategic sourcing event, negotiating contracts and cutting deals. Because you invested so much time securing those terms, you’d stick with them for two to three years. But now, with all of this uncertainty, you don’t have that luxury. AI is enabling you to be more agile to deal with changing macroeconomic and geopolitical realities in real time.”

Esteves frames the stakes in human terms: “We owe it to the people we employ, our friends and family, to be ready, to survive and thrive in this new era.”