AI Is Not the Strategy
Adopting AI because competitors are adopting AI is how companies end up automating processes that should not exist.
Somewhere right now, a leadership team is approving an AI initiative whose success metric is 'having an AI initiative'. The board asked, a budget appeared, and a chatbot will shortly be attached to a website whose actual problem is that nobody understands the pricing.
We like AI. We build with it. Which is exactly why we keep saying the unfashionable thing: AI is not the strategy. The business outcome is. A tool, however remarkable, inherits the quality of the system it is dropped into.
Automating a mess produces a faster mess
A common AI failure is not technical at all. It is sequencing. A company automates a workflow nobody has examined in years, and the automation faithfully reproduces every redundant step, at scale, with confidence, around the clock.
Technology should remove friction. Not create a new Slack channel about friction.
A boring, useful test
For any proposed AI use case, write one sentence: 'This saves [whom] [how much time or money] on [which decision or task], and we will know because [which number moves].' If the sentence cannot be completed, the use case is theatre. If it can, you often discover something better still: the fix may not need AI at all. It needs a form with fewer fields, or two systems that finally talk to each other.
That is less exciting to announce. It is considerably more exciting to bank.
TRY THE EXERCISE The AI Use-Case Sentence, a short worksheet on the Resources page.
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Digital, Technology & Automation
Connect websites, data and workflows so your team can spend less time moving information.
THE DISCIPLINEAI
The problem is rarely that you need AI. It is usually a spreadsheet called FINAL_v7.
THE DISCIPLINEAutomation
Process is just kindness to your future self.
Reading is free. The diagnosis is a conversation.
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KNOWLEDGE · TECH, WITHOUT THEATREBusiness Process Automation and Marketing Automation
Business process automation uses software to carry out repeatable steps in a workflow without manual effort; marketing automation applies the same idea to customer communication. Both work only on processes that were worth keeping in the first place.