AI adoption
The cheetah and the snail
If you have a lightning-fast, cheetah-like marketing team, but a snail-like legal review team, you can only move at snail's pace.
If you have a lightning-fast, cheetah-like marketing team, but a snail-like legal review team, you can only move at snail’s pace.
This was an example I used in the Building the Enterprise AI Stack webinar. Bolting AI onto existing processesGoldratt’s Herbie, retold in Essentialism: the slowest hiker sets the troop’s pace, so take weight out of his backpack and spread it across the group can give you a bit of an uplift, but the bottlenecks remain.
The bottleneck moves
Today, a first draft of content can be created in minutes rather than days. The bottleneck in creating new content has shrunk dramatically - but you’ll only benefit if other parts of your business have kept pace. If not, your queued content will quickly overwhelm these older business systems.
The bottleneck simply moves down the process.
This is where a lot of AI adoption gets stuck. AI is inserted into the steps people can see, driven by the people who are experimenting with AI. They celebrate the time saved individually, but fail to address the larger, surrounding business processes it depends on. Frustration builds, governance can be bypassed, corners are cut and problems start to develop.
Think holistically
You need to think holisticallyAccording to McKinsey, 75% of high-performing organisations have redesigned their workflows, against 25% of everyone else across your processes.
Looking at your processes through AI-first lens means starting with the outcome and working back through the entire process. Each step needs to justify its own existence.
Question every step
Why is it there? Who’s using it? What’s it for? Which steps still need human judgment? Which controls protect quality? Which hand-offs have become habit rather than necessity?
It doesn’t mean throwing away everything that worked before. It means taking the time to understand what works and why.
AI affords us all an opportunity to challenge our current processes - but we need to take a holistic approach, or we’ll just end up moving the bottleneck.