A surprising number of businesses want to do something with AI right now.

Understandable. The possibilities are enormous. Every day brings something that seemed impossible yesterday. And if you are not doing anything with AI today, it is easy to feel you will have missed something tomorrow.

So people look for tools, organise workshops and automate processes.

But: Which process, exactly?

That is often the more interesting question.

Before we talk about AI, we talk about work.

How does an enquiry reach the business?

Who knows what needs to happen next?

Where is the information?

Who decides?

What gets entered three times?

Which spreadsheet does only one person know about?

And why is someone still printing something out, filling it in with a pen and then typing it back into a computer?

Don’t laugh. It’s worked for years.

Until that one person goes on holiday for three weeks.

Especially in businesses that have grown over many years, a surprising amount of knowledge lives in people.

It only becomes a problem when that knowledge exists nowhere else.

And now comes AI.

AI can find, structure, compare, summarise and share information.

It can take on routine work.

It can make knowledge accessible that was scattered across folders, emails, systems and people’s heads.

That is huge.

But it cannot answer one question for us:

Which of these things should we be doing at all?

AI does not make a bad process
better.
Just faster.

Automating an unnecessary step does not make it necessary.

And putting a new tool on an organisational problem still leaves an organisational problem. Just with a login.

That is why we prefer to start a little earlier.

Not with the software.

Not with the tool.

And not with the question of which AI model happens to be the best right now.

With the people who work in the business every day.

We ask.

We watch.

We look for the places where information gets lost, work gets done twice or nobody quite remembers why something is done that way.

Sometimes the answer is AI.

Sometimes automation.

Sometimes a better process.

Sometimes a conversation between two people who have worked in the same business for five years and have never sat down together.

And sometimes you should simply stop doing something.

That is transformation too.

Technology has become rather good.

That is the good news.

The more complicated news is:

Businesses are still made of people.

We consider that an advantage.