You are not falling behind because your team is not working hard enough.
You are falling behind because the work itself has outgrown the way it gets done. Decisions that should take minutes take days. Information lives in inboxes, spreadsheets, and the heads of three people who have been here the longest. Every new hire takes months to get up to speed because nothing is documented the way it actually runs.
Your competitors are not smarter. They are just automating the parts of their operations that you are still running by hand. The gap compounds every quarter.
You have probably looked at AI already. Maybe you bought a tool that nobody adopted. Maybe a vendor showed you a demo that looked impressive but had nothing to do with how your business actually works. Maybe you are still trying to figure out which department should even own this.
None of that means you are behind on AI. It means you have not found the right approach yet.