It’s Always the Process, Stupid!

Stop chasing the hype. Stop looking for a specialized “AI Savior.”

Go back to the whiteboard. Map out your value chain—especially the messy, human-centric parts involving unstructured data that you previously ignored. Find the bottlenecks. Identify the waste.

If you automate a stupid decision, you just make stupid decisions at light speed.

Executives are frantically asking, “What is our AI strategy?”

But here is the hard truth:

There is no such thing as an AI strategy.
There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO).

If you want to use AI to process unstructured data, you must first bring structure to the workflow itself. You need to improve your process design to account for the ambiguity that AI handles.

Ask yourself:

1. What is the trigger? (Where does the unstructured mess come from?)
2. What is the transformation? (What exactly is the human—or now the AI—supposed to extract or deduce from that mess?)
3. What is the structured output? (How does this flow back into your rigid ERP or CRM systems?)

Like every major technological shift before it—from the steam engine to the spreadsheet—AI does not inherently make an organization smarter. AI, like any other tool, only makes faster.

If your underlying business process is a mess, sprinkling “AI dust” on it won’t turn it into gold. It will just speed up the rate at which you generate garbage.