Enterprise AI adoption has reached a point where buying models and launching pilots are no longer the hardest parts of transformation. The bigger challenge is increasingly whether senior executives understand enough about AI to make informed decisions about where it should be deployed, how work should change and who should be accountable for the results.
Keystone is targeting that leadership gap with its acquisition of Zero Gravitas, an AI executive education and capability-development firm founded by Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani. The deal will fold Zero Gravitas into Keystone’s AI Navigator offering, while Lakhani joins Keystone as chief innovation advisor.
The acquisition gives Keystone a combination of AI strategy, implementation and hands-on executive education at a time when organizations are struggling to move from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment.
Keystone has acquired Zero Gravitas, bringing an executive-focused AI education business into its broader consulting and transformation portfolio.
Founded in 2023 by Karim Lakhani, a Harvard Business School professor known for research into AI, digital transformation and human-AI collaboration, Zero Gravitas has trained more than 20,000 senior leaders, according to Keystone. Its customers span industries including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, technology, entertainment and legal services.
The acquisition is part of Keystone’s AI Navigator offering, which is designed to help organizations develop AI capabilities and translate AI strategies into business outcomes.
Lakhani will become Keystone’s Chief Innovation Advisor. He is also the founding chair of the Harvard Business School AI Institute and founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard.
The strategic rationale is straightforward: enterprises increasingly have access to AI models and infrastructure, but many leadership teams still lack the practical knowledge to determine how those technologies should change their organizations.
That distinction is becoming increasingly important.
Enterprise AI adoption is rising faster than enterprise transformation
According to McKinsey’s 2025 global AI survey, 88% of respondents said their organizations regularly use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. Yet only about one-third said their organizations had begun scaling AI programs across the enterprise, while just 7% reported that AI had been fully scaled.
The gap creates a different problem from the one enterprises faced during the first wave of cloud and software adoption.
Companies can now access foundation models from providers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, alongside thousands of specialized AI applications. The constraint is increasingly organizational: selecting use cases, redesigning workflows, establishing governance and getting business leaders to understand what the technology can realistically accomplish.
Lakhani’s work has focused heavily on that intersection between technology and organizational change.
He co-authored Competing in the Age of AI with Keystone co-founder and co-chair Marco Iansiti, developing a framework for understanding how AI can reshape operating models and knowledge work.
Zero Gravitas extends that thinking into executive education by emphasizing hands-on engagement with AI rather than treating AI literacy as a conventional classroom exercise.
From AI awareness to AI capability
The distinction between awareness and capability is becoming an important one for enterprise technology teams.
A CEO may understand that generative AI can automate knowledge work. That does not necessarily mean the executive knows how to evaluate an AI agent, identify a process suitable for automation, assess model risk or determine whether a workflow should be redesigned around AI.
Zero Gravitas’ methodology is structured around learning, doing, imagining, acting and caring about AI’s effects on business and work, according to Keystone.
That approach puts executives closer to the technology itself.
Instead of delegating every AI decision to a CIO, chief data officer or technical team, the objective is to give business leaders enough practical familiarity to participate directly in decisions about AI deployment.
This reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI training. Gartner has emphasized that executive AI literacy requires deliberate program design across areas such as ownership, goals, communication and change management. Its research also identifies executive prioritization and cross-functional authority as challenges for organizations building AI-literacy programs.
AI Navigator adds strategy and execution
Keystone’s pitch is that executive education becomes more useful when connected to the rest of an organization’s AI transformation.
AI Navigator combines Keystone’s expertise in advanced technology, applied economics and business strategy. Integrating Zero Gravitas gives the offering an additional layer focused specifically on executive capability.
That could position the service differently from standalone AI training providers.
The market already includes executive education programs from universities, consulting firms, cloud vendors and specialist AI-training companies. Microsoft, Google Cloud and AWS, for example, have invested heavily in AI-skills and certification ecosystems designed to increase workforce readiness.
Keystone is instead targeting the C-suite and boardroom, where the questions tend to be less about how to use a particular model and more about how AI should alter the economics and operating structure of the company.
That distinction becomes particularly relevant as enterprises move toward AI agents and autonomous workflows.
An employee learning how to use an AI assistant is one problem. A leadership team deciding whether an agent should be allowed to execute procurement, customer-service or financial processes is another.
The latter requires technology knowledge, business judgment and governance to operate together.
The leadership problem may become harder with agents
The rise of agentic AI makes executive AI literacy more consequential.
Unlike a conventional chatbot, an AI agent can potentially plan and execute multiple steps within a workflow. McKinsey’s 2025 research found that organizations are already experimenting with agentic AI, even while most broader AI programs remain stuck in experimentation or early scaling.
That creates a management challenge. As AI systems gain more autonomy, leaders need to understand not only what the technology can generate, but what actions it should be authorized to take.
They also need to decide where humans remain in the loop, what data agents can access, how performance is measured and how failures are contained.
For CIOs and chief AI officers, this means executive education is potentially becoming part of AI infrastructure rather than an optional professional-development exercise.
A different kind of AI transformation consultancy
Keystone’s acquisition of Zero Gravitas reflects a larger evolution in the enterprise AI services market.
Early AI consulting often centered on strategy decks, proof-of-concept development and model selection. The next stage is increasingly about organizational redesign: changing processes, building AI-native operating models and ensuring executives understand the technology well enough to lead those changes.
Lakhani’s appointment strengthens Keystone’s credibility in that area, particularly given his academic work on AI and organizational transformation.
But the acquisition will ultimately be judged by whether that expertise translates into measurable enterprise outcomes.
For companies evaluating AI transformation partners, executive education alone will not solve problems involving data quality, model governance, infrastructure or workflow integration. Conversely, technical implementation without executive understanding can produce disconnected pilots that never become enterprise capabilities.
The combination Keystone is building attempts to address both sides.
Its success may offer a useful indicator of where enterprise AI consulting is heading: away from simply helping companies adopt AI tools and toward helping leadership teams understand how AI changes the organization itself.
Market Landscape
The enterprise AI market is moving from experimentation toward a more difficult phase: scaling AI across workflows and operating models.
McKinsey’s 2025 research found that 88% of organizations surveyed were using AI in at least one business function, but most remained in experimentation or pilot stages. Only around one-third reported beginning to scale AI programs.
The skills gap is part of that challenge. Gartner research on AI literacy emphasizes that successful programs require executive ownership, defined goals, communications and change management rather than simply distributing training materials.
Meanwhile, AI vendors including Microsoft, Google and Amazon are building increasingly sophisticated cloud, model and agent platforms. As the technology becomes easier to access, differentiation is shifting toward implementation, governance and organizational capability.
For enterprise buyers, that creates three broad categories of AI support:
- Technology infrastructure — models, cloud platforms, GPUs, data and development frameworks.
- AI applications and agents — software that applies AI to specific business workflows.
- Organizational transformation — strategy, governance, workforce development and operating-model redesign.
Keystone’s acquisition is aimed primarily at the third category while connecting it to the first two.
Top Insights
- Keystone acquired Zero Gravitas to add hands-on executive AI education to AI Navigator, targeting the leadership capability gap slowing enterprise AI transformation.
- Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani joins Keystone as Chief Innovation Advisor, strengthening its expertise in AI strategy and organizational transformation.
- Zero Gravitas has trained more than 20,000 senior leaders, giving Keystone an established executive-learning platform across multiple industries.
- McKinsey reports that 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one function, yet most have not reached enterprise-scale deployment.
- The rise of AI agents increases the need for executives to understand automation, governance, human oversight and workflow redesign before deployment.
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