EPMA

The narrative you've been hearing about mid-market AI is that adoption is behind.

The data says otherwise.

51% of mid-market companies report improved business insights from AI, ahead of larger peers. Adoption is happening. What's missing is the governance, integration, and measurement infrastructure that turns adoption into defensible value.

Only 14% of mid-market firms have a formal AI strategy. 70% say at least half their applications aren't AI-ready. Fewer than a third of decision-makers can tie AI investment to financial results.

That's not an AI problem. It's a proof problem. And CFOs have noticed.

Read the article 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/measuring-ai-roi-mid-market/

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Straight Talk from EPMA, week 3.

This week we hand the mic to Parthiv Bhuta, Vice President at EPMA. Parthiv spends his days inside the PM platforms our clients depend on, which means he hears the same complaints over and over.

Q: What's the one thing you hear PMs complain about with their tools?

A: Most PMs complain that their tools feel like doing a second job, an administrative burden rather than a system that helps them.

They feel the UI isn't designed the way they actually work. Or that different systems don't talk to each other, so they have to enter the same information twice. A common example is entering financial information in the financial tool and then again in the PM tool so they can forecast correctly.

Then there's the classic. Having to build a separate PowerPoint presentation every week for status reporting instead of being able to pull directly from the PM tool their team already uses.

👀What would you want one of our leaders to answer honestly? Drop your questions in the comments.

Hiring feels harder than ever in 2026.
The natural assumption is talent shortage.
The actual problem is that your process contradicts your own stated urgency.

Job postings are drawing 50% more applications than they were 18 months ago. Qualified candidates aren't scarce. Their patience is. And most companies are burning through it in three specific ways they don't even realize.

Here's exactly what's happening in your hiring process.

Read the full blog here 👉https://f.mtr.cool/mzol8gbq3o

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One line from PMI's June report captures the shift that most PMO leaders are feeling but can't articulate:

"Delivery excellence is necessary, but no longer differentiating. Executives expect reliable ex*****on. What they reward is strategic contribution."

Every word matters. Delivery is now assumed. It's not what you're noticed for. It's the price of entry.

If your PMO's value story is still built on "we deliver on time and on budget," you're answering a question executives stopped asking.

Here's what they're rewarding instead.

Read the article here 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/what-executives-actually-want-from-their-pmo-in-2026/

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Straight Talk from EPMA, week 2.

This week we hand the mic to Gareth Whitla, our AVP of Staffing, who has spent decades watching hiring processes succeed and fail up close.

Anyone who has run an interview with a team that couldn't agree on what they were actually looking for will recognize this one.

What would you want one of our leaders to answer honestly? Drop your questions in the comments.

Complex project failure rates just nearly tripled. Skills-based hiring is mostly theater. Employee engagement collapsed from 88% to 64% while retention held steady.

Each of these is a headline on its own. Together, they explain why so many operations leaders are watching their delivery slip while every workforce dashboard tells them everything is fine.

The workforce data most executives trust is producing false confidence at exactly the moment when the work is getting harder.

Three trends worth reading together, not separately.

Read more here 👉https://blog.epmainc.com/the-three-workforce-trends-executives-are-missing-and-what-theyre-costing-delivery/

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One of the more expensive habits in mid-market operations:

Solving today's problem in a way that creates tomorrow's problem.

A new process gets added to fix a data quality issue, but nobody prunes the old process, so now the team is doing both. A new tool gets bought to solve a reporting gap, but the old tool doesn't get retired, so now there are two sources of truth. A workaround gets built to handle an edge case, but the edge case becomes normal, and the workaround becomes permanent.

Operational complexity accumulates faster than it gets removed. That's how organizations end up with technical debt AND process debt.

Introducing Straight Talk from EPMA.

Every Friday, we hand the mic to someone on our leadership team and ask them one honest question. No spin. No polish. Just the real answer.

Want to hear one of our leaders answer a specific question? Drop it in the comments. Great ones will show up in future posts.

A question we ask early in every consulting engagement:

"What have you already tried, and why didn't it work?"

It's a boring question on the surface. In practice, it's the most useful one we can ask. Because the honest answer usually reveals more about what will actually solve the problem than any diagnostic assessment could.

Most problems have been attacked before. What matters is understanding why the previous attempts fell short. That's where the real constraints live, and where the next solution has to account for them.

Skip that question, and you end up recommending something that already failed.

You don't have a dedicated recruiter.
You can't afford a bad hire.
You don't have time to run the search yourself.

That's the situation most staffing firms weren't built to serve. Traditional staffing is built for volume. Submit resumes. Move on. And leave the interpretation, the interviews, the comparisons, and the candidate management to a hiring manager who is also running the business.

What lean executive teams actually need is something different. And when the hire matters, the difference is significant.

We wrote about the four specific things a real recruitment partner does for lean teams, and the five questions to ask a staffing firm before you start a critical search.

Read the article here 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/what-a-lean-executive-team-needs-from-a-staffing-firm-that-most-dont-provide/

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