Thursday, October 1, 2026
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way many Long Island businesses operate, but Susan Gatti believes too many companies are starting with the wrong question.
Instead of asking which platform they should buy, business leaders should first ask what problem they're trying to solve.
"There's a lot of pressure on companies, especially on CEOs, on leaders, to make rapid decisions about investment in technology," said Gatti, founder and managing partner of Disruptive Spark. "We actually think that pressure is artificial. Companies should really be making clear decisions about what they're looking to solve in their business."
That perspective has shaped her firm's approach to organizational transformation for years.
While artificial intelligence is now driving many of the conversations Disruptive Spark has with clients, Gatti said the challenge isn't unique to AI. Organizations have long struggled to realize the return they expected from major initiatives because they focused on the technology while overlooking the people responsible for making it successful.
Gatti and Sheryl Rhoades, an AI strategist, have been helping organizations navigate change for years. Before Disruptive Spark, the two worked together in learning and development, where they were frequently brought into projects after strategic decisions had already been made.
Over time, they began noticing something that repeated itself regardless of industry or technology.
"We found over time it was the same patterns, the same behaviors, and it had little to do with the strategy," Gatti said. "It had more to do with what was happening in the organization and people's own natural resistance."
That realization prompted them to build a consulting firm focused less on training and more on helping organizations make better strategic decisions before implementation begins.
"We wanted more opportunities to help businesses run better, get better ROI," Gatti said. "We rebuilt ourselves as a business consulting company so that we could really influence decisions at the senior leader, at the strategic level."
Although AI dominates today's business headlines, Gatti is quick to point out that Disruptive Spark is not in the business of selling technology.
Instead, the firm's work begins with understanding how an organization operates today, where it hopes to be in the future and whether a technology investment supports those goals.
"We're not a technology company," Gatti said. "We're here to say, 'How is your business running? Where does it want to be in three to five years? How is this tool going to do this?'"
That conversation often changes the direction of an implementation before software is ever purchased.
Rather than encouraging organizations to move faster, Disruptive Spark encourages them to make more informed decisions about where technology can have the greatest impact.
According to Gatti, organizations routinely develop communication plans for executives, vendors and customers while overlooking the employees expected to use the new technology every day.
"The group that's never accounted for in the project plan is the internal employee," she said. "We never get all the way down into the organization of the people that actually have to bear the weight of this and go through the transition."
Rhoades sees those concerns surface throughout nearly every implementation.
"Technology should reduce friction, not create it," she said.
Employees often wonder whether AI will replace part of their job, change their responsibilities or diminish the value they bring to the organization. Those concerns don't disappear after a training session, Rhoades said, and ignoring them can make adoption far more difficult than leaders expect.
"People bring value, not AI," she said. "AI helps you do everything more efficiently."
Helping employees understand how technology supports their work, rather than replaces it, creates greater confidence and encourages long-term adoption, Rhodes explained.
Disruptive Spark believes successful implementation depends as much on leadership as it does on technology.
The firm works with executive teams and frontline managers to identify resistance, strengthen communication and create accountability before and after a new initiative launches. Managers are often the people employees turn to with questions, making their ability to lead through change essential to achieving the business outcomes executives expect.
That philosophy has led the firm to develop readiness assessments that help organizations measure confidence before implementation begins.
One of the tools Disruptive Spark has developed is what Gatti calls a one-question readiness assessment, designed to help organizations understand whether employees are truly prepared for a major change before a new technology or strategic initiative goes live.
Rather than assuming people are ready because they've completed training, the assessment asks employees to rate their confidence in adopting the change. According to Gatti, those responses provide leaders with valuable insight into where additional communication, coaching or leadership support may be needed before implementation begins.
"We can actually, with fairly good accuracy, go into an organization and predict how well somebody will navigate through a big structural change," Gatti said. "Our resilience survey gives us a picture of who's ready and where leaders may need to provide more support."
She recalled working with an organization preparing to launch a major technology initiative after nearly two years of planning. Although leadership believed the organization was ready, a readiness assessment revealed that many employees lacked the confidence needed to successfully navigate the transition.
Rather than moving forward as scheduled, leadership decided to pause the rollout and spend three weeks on a targeted communication campaign. Because the organization addressed concerns, employees were better prepared for the change.
"When we measured readiness again, they had reached the baseline confidence they needed, and the implementation went far more smoothly," Gatti said.
