AI Won't Transform Your Business
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~450 word | ~2 min read
AI won’t transform your business. No tool does.
Businesses transform when motivated people make clever use of new tools! Or, those same people using existing tools in a novel approach can have the same effect.
But the point remains, it’s not about the tech! People, Process, Technology in that order! Moreover, ‘transformation’ means to change form. For an organization that means new teams, new departments, and new hierarchies.
AI will not transform your business… Unless. It will not transform your business unless you use to tool to create new ways of working. That is ones that were not possible without AI. Otherwise you’re just doing to same activities with a new coat of paint. Moving from pen-and-paper forms to electronic forms won’t transform your business. You must leverage the unique advantages of electronic forms to transform. Suppose to moved from paper to electronic. But your back-end process still prints and mails those forms to the warehouse over 3 days. You’ll gain almost no benefit!
Here history offers us a useful lens. Goldratt dealt with this same pattern during the dawn of ERP systems. They promised huge value. But very few actually transformed the businesses that bought them. Those businesses that did transform used their ERP to do business in new ways. They did not migrate their old way of working into the new tool. Instead they transformed by renewing the way they thought about their business. We would do well to learn from such historical lessons.
Business is fundamentally about solving a problem, about serving some need. Technology offers us the opportunity to solve that same problem in a new, and better way. But not if all we do is same-song-and-dance with a new coat of paint. We should work backwards from our goal. Design a new target process to meet those needs using the technology we have today. If we remain bound to “the way we’ve always done it”, we will not transform. Now, we cannot transform alone. Instead we ought to collaboratively renew how we think about our business. Use your new target process to spur on such conversations.
AI won’t transform your business.
Motivated people making clever use of it might.
AI won’t transform your business unless…
You must use it to create new, previously impossible, ways to do business.
Don’t do the same-song-and-dance with a new coat of paint.
Instead renew the way you think about doing business.
Then you can transform your business by using the new technology!
Check out these books for useful techniques and approaches as you do:
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