One of the activities I have to participate in every week is dealing with vendor calls from people trying to sell me AI technology. The pitch is usually for a tool that I already have or could build.
But what I actually need is something that helps me improve the business.
Nobody growing up asked Santa Claus for more dashboards.
Investors aren’t looking for business reports as a return on their investment. The goal is to grow the company, manage its risks, and give employees the clarity and evidence they need to make good decisions toward those goals.
The tools-first problem is neither novel nor rare. When I was in consulting, and later in management roles, I knew I was in trouble when a stakeholder discussion started with which vendor or tool they wanted. It usually meant that the people supporting them had failed by focusing on technology rather than the underlying business need.
The root of this is understanding your business and your market.
To improve business outcomes, you first need an accurate map. That map of business processes comes from the people running those processes, negotiating with one another, and building a common language and understanding of how the business actually operates.
AI tools cannot create that map by themselves.
That is organizational work done by humans. And while AI can help with change management, it is not going to manage the change for you.
So the next time a vendor comes to you with a solution, ask what they are asking you to do to make their tool work.
If the tool requires your organization to supply the process knowledge, data definitions, decision rules, integrations, governance, include that work in the total cost of ownership.
And if they claim none of that is necessary, generally assume they don’t understand the space they are selling into.
The question most of us face every day is: What should we do to make the business run better today?
Not: What tools would be good to install in our environment?
Also see: Of AgentHouses and Agentic Donuts https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agenthouses-agentic-donuts-yakov-shkolnikov-ujjrc/