The 8-Pound Camera That Killed a $28 Billion Company

In 1975, Steve Sasson walked into a conference room at Kodak headquarters carrying an 8-pound box.

It was the first digital camera. It captured 0.01 megapixel images onto a cassette tape. It took 23 seconds to record a single photo!

The executives looked at it. They saw the future of photography sitting on their conference table.

They didn't ignore it. That's the part everyone gets wrong about the Kodak story. They understood it. They filed the patents. They created internal digital teams. They built better prototypes. They had a 15-year head start on everyone.

But they made one fatal mistake.

They gave their engineers the new technology. They never taught their salespeople how to sell it. They handed digital tools to teams who only knew how to think in film. They assumed the technology would change behavior.

It didn't.

Sales kept pushing film because that's what they knew. Product managers built digital features that film customers didn't want. Retail partners had no idea how to explain digital to consumers. Everyone had access to the future. Nobody knew how to use it.

By 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

Fast Forward to Today

Right now, 87% of companies say AI is a strategic priority. Only 11% report meaningful returns on their AI investments. (McKinsey, 2024)

Sound familiar?

You bought the tools. You announced the initiative. You set up the accounts. Your team has access to ChatGPT, Jasper, Notion AI, whatever the flavor of the month is.

And nothing changed.

Your customer service team still escalates everything. Your ops people manually enter data. Your sales team writes the same emails they wrote last year. The AI sits there, an 8-pound camera collecting dust.

The gap isn't the technology.

The gap is capability.

You can't hand someone a tool and expect transformation. You need to teach them how to see differently. How to think differently. How to identify where AI actually helps versus where it's just expensive theater.

Kodak didn't fail because digital cameras were bad. They failed because they never built the capability to use them.

Don't make the same mistake.