Why AI Isn’t Making Companies Faster

Why AI Isn’t Making Companies Faster

Why AI isn’t making companies faster? Common question I get these days, and the answer isn’t that mysterious. Everybody bought the tools, and ran the pilots, but nothing sped up.

That doesn’t mean the money was wasted, and it doesn’t mean AI is a fraud. AI is an amplifier. What it amplified is a problem we had ten years ago and still haven’t addressed.

The gap between a decision and a customer

There’s a lag between the moment an executive team decides something and the moment a customer actually feels it…the moment it converts to revenue, or to something valuable.

So ask yourself this question – “When did your company last make a real decision? And how long before anyone outside the building noticed?”

Most leaders can’t answer that. That’s the whole problem, and it’s the reason AI isn’t making companies faster no matter how much they’re investing right now.

It was never the technology

Agile is supposedly finished. Has been for a few years now. And yet…lack of agility still shows up in the top five concerns CEOs report every year. They don’t call it agile. They call it speed-to-market, nimbleness, adaptability…the ability to respond when the market moves.

Meanwhile every organization I know is being asked to do the impossible. Extract more value from fewer people. Make cuts where no cuts remain. Faster and cheaper while somehow getting better.

That runs straight into what I learned in my project management days — the holy triangle of budget, time and scope. You don’t get all three. And you certainly don’t cut one and keep quality where it was.

The practical maximum