It's Always the Process, Stupid

Summary

Let’s rip the Band-Aid off immediately: 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.In the world of Business IT, we get seduced by the shiny new toy. Right now, that toy is Artificial Intelligence. Boardrooms are buzzing with buzzwords like LLMs, agentic workflows, and generative reasoning. 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).The "Magic Wand" FallacyToo many enterprises treat AI like a magic wand. They believe that by implementing a sophisticated neural network, their structural inefficiencies will vanish. They think AI brings intelligence.It doesn’t.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 you automate a stupid decision, you just make stupid decisions at light speed. If you apply an agentic AI workflow to a bureaucratic nightmare of an approval chain, you haven't fixed the bureaucracy; you’ve just built a robot that hates its job as much as your employees do.The Unstructured Data TrapThere is, however, one superpower AI possesses that previous tools lacked: It is the first technology that is truly useful for handling unstructured data.For decades, traditional software demanded structure. Rows, columns, booleans, and fixed fields. If data didn't fit the box, the computer couldn't read it.AI changes this. It can read messy emails, interpret vague Slack messages, parse PDFs, and analyze images. But this capability exposes a massive, hidden problem in most enterprises.Processes that rely on unstructured data are usually unstructured processes.Because computers couldn't handle the mess, humans handled it (before AI). And humans don't always follow a flow chart. These pro...