There’s no shortage of noise around AI at the moment.
Every week there seems to be another tool promising to completely change the way we work. But I think a lot of businesses are starting the conversation in the wrong place.
The question shouldn’t be, “What AI should we buy?” A much better question is, “Where are we wasting time?”
Think about what happens inside your business every day. Someone manually prepares the same report. Information gets copied from one system into another.
Someone spends half an hour looking through emails for something they know they’ve seen before. Another person spends hours turning notes into documents or answering the same types of enquiries.
None of these things seem like a big deal on their own. But add them all together across a business and suddenly you’re burning a lot of time.
That’s where I think AI gets interesting. Instead of chasing the latest AI tool, look for the repetitive, administrative work getting in the way of your people doing more valuable things.
That doesn’t mean everything should be automated either. There are parts of business where experience, judgement, relationships and simply having a conversation matter. AI should support those things, not replace them.
Over the next few years, I don’t think the winners will necessarily be the businesses using the most AI. I think they’ll be the ones asking better questions.
Where are we losing time? What could we do differently? What should stay human?
And if we could give our people some of that time back, what could they be doing instead?
That’s a business conversation, not an IT one.