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" Fallacy
Too 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 Trap
There 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 processes—like "handling a complex customer complaint" or "brainstorming a marketing campaign"—are often ad-hoc, intuitive, and completely undocumented. They live in the heads of your senior staff, not in your SOPs.
You Can’t Automate What You Haven’t Designed
This brings us back to BPO. You cannot apply AI to these "hidden" processes until you drag them into the light.
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:
- What is the trigger? (Where does the unstructured mess come from?)
- What is the transformation? (What exactly is the human—or now the AI—supposed to extract or deduce from that mess?)
- What is the structured output? (How does this flow back into your rigid ERP or CRM systems?)
Speed vs. Intelligence
Let’s clarify the distinction between "smarter" and "faster."
Intelligence implies wisdom, context, and nuance. While AI models are simulating reasoning better every day, in a business context, they are fundamentally pattern-matching engines. They excel at acceleration.
- The Old Way: An analyst reads 50 contracts (unstructured), highlights risks based on gut feeling (unstructured process), and summarizes them in 3 days.
- The AI Way: An AI scans 50 contracts and extracts specific risk clauses based on defined parameters in 3 minutes.
The process (Review Contracts -> Identify Risk -> Summarize) hasn't changed, but it had to be rigorously defined for the AI to work. The intelligence (knowing what a "risk" actually means) still requires human governance. What has changed is the velocity.
The Bottom Line
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.
Once you have a streamlined, logical, and robust business process, then apply AI to hit the accelerator.
Technology changes.
The rules of business efficiency do not.
It’s always the process, stupid!
And that's where actual AI Tools are missing that point, because they weren't build for that
The Great IT-Divide: Why AI-Adoption in enterprises is failing
IT innovation moved from business tools to social tech, creating two distinct IT worlds: Business-IT (compliance, efficiency) and Social-IT (social interaction). Grasping this divide is crucial for enterprise adoption and explains why businesses struggle with AI uptake.
Live long and prosper 😉🖖