All of the Big Analyst Firms, Consultancies, and Vendors are telling you that you need AI, that it’s the only technology that’s going to allow you to get with the digital times, and that everyone else is using it, so you should too.

But the reality is that you probably don’t need AI, it’s not the only technology that can bring you up to date in the digital age, and while many people are using it, 94%/95% are FAILING.

The only hope you have to succeed is to be brutally honest, to ADMIT what you don’t know, that you’re only chasing AI because of FOMO and FUD, and that real progress has always been methodical and one step at a time.

More specifically, from where you are starting, not from where the market pretends you are.

The only organizations that have been successful at AI are those that:

• honestly assess where they are today
• determines their readiness for change
• identifies the most time consuming processes they are willing to change
• identifies the appropriate automation one process at a time, which is often just simple workflows/RPAs/built-in automations in existing platforms and other times ML/ARPA
• monitors and tweaks them until they run smoothly and reliably
• uses modern meta-workfows/ARPA/AI to connect the individual automations together where, and only where, it makes sense
• only slaps guard-railed semantic tech / focussed SLMs on top to provide a natural language interface that processes inputs and outputs fixed action requests where appropriate

Successful companies don’t go all in an unproven tech, don’t try to do big bang projects (as that only results in big failures and sometimes the greatest supply chain disasters of all time), and definitely didn’t take the advice of the BIG X that promoted multi-year modernization mega-projects with no successes that they can point to.

In other words, the only companies that have succeeded with AI (the 5% to 6% depending on if you would rather go with McKinsey or MIT) are those that learned from the mega-ERP disasters of yesteryear and did a sequence of successive mini-projects that each built on the lass and slowly ramped to mega success.

In other words, they understand that you have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run. And if you can’t even crawl, you’re not ready to try and run at the Olympics, which is the level of tech maturity you have to be at to HOPE to succeed with AI.