Your team copies you
A director slid his laptop across the table and said: "I've given it to Mark, he's good with this stuff." Mark had six months, a budget and a mandate. Nine months later there was a pilot in the customer service team, a report, and a company that worked exactly the way it had worked before. The director had opened the tool twice.
That story repeats itself in company after company, and the reason has nothing to do with Mark. The belief underneath it is that an AI transformation is a project you can assign to someone. It is the one thing about this subject that costs the most time and delivers the least.
The assignment that came back empty
An organisation relates to change the way its leadership relates to change. People read what you do, not what you announce. A managing director who talks about an AI strategy in the Monday meeting and then forwards every question to a specialist has already given the answer: this is a side track, and it is safe to wait.
You cannot hand over a transformation you refuse to go through yourself. That is the sentence I would put on the wall of every mid sized company that is now writing its first AI plan. It sounds harsh. It is mostly practical, because it tells you exactly where to start: with your own week.
Three mirrors
There are three questions that tell you where you stand, and all three are about you.
- Do you use it yourself? Not once, for a demo. In your own work, on your own material, in a task you care about.
- Are you willing to see what it shows? The tool exposes which of your processes exist for the customer and which exist for your internal comfort.
- Are you removing work or strengthening people? Both are real paths. Only one of them makes your company better at the thing customers pay you for.
Most leaders I speak to are honest about the first question and uncomfortable with the second. That discomfort is the useful part.
The speed of your company is the speed of the person at the top opening the tool.
What the mirror shows
AI tends to show you your own organisation before it shows you anything about your customer. You point it at your customer service and you find out that half the questions come from a form nobody has fixed in four years. You point it at your quotes and you see that the delay sits in an approval step that exists because of a mistake made in 2019.
That is unpleasant reading and it is also the cheapest consultancy you will ever get. The companies that move are the ones where the leader reads the finding out loud in the management meeting and then changes the process the same month.
Removing or strengthening
Automate the mechanical so you get room for the human. Copying data between systems, sorting incoming mail, drafting the fourth version of a standard quote: that work carries no relationship with it. Take it away and you give your people back the hours they need for the conversation a customer actually remembers.
The choice shows up in what you do with those hours. A company on the removing path books them as savings. A company on the strengthening path puts them into contact, craftsmanship and follow up. Customers feel the difference within a quarter.
What you do on Monday
Start with your own calendar, because that is the only part of this you control completely.
- Block two hours this week and do one real task with an AI tool yourself, start to finish.
- Write down the one thing it showed you about your own process, and name the owner who will fix it.
- Pick one mechanical task in your company and take it off a person's plate this month.
- Decide out loud, in your management meeting, where the freed hours go.
- Say in that same meeting what you tried yourself and what went wrong.
The chapter this comes from closes the book with a manifesto of ten principles, written for leaders who want to go first instead of appointing someone. If you want the full reasoning and the ten principles in one place, that is what the book gives you. Bekijk het boek