The companies that will win at AI are the boring, dramaless companies.
I’m not talking about the companies developing GPTs but the people using them. The firms that deploy these models to get this or that done.
The ones that are going to be successful are not the ones who spend the most money. Or even have the brightest tech staff.
It’s the ones who already did the hard work of management. That day-in, day-out work of creating working processes that you document clearly, where things got written down at the right level, where they know what each role is supposed to do.
Because GPTs rely on what’ s in your computer systems already. If you want the AI to automate something, it has to know what to automate. If the process isn’t document clearly, it doesn’t have anything to know how you actually get work done.
This is true across the board. Things have to already be digitized.
And you’d be surprised how many firms don’t have their key processes well documented.
Or have such processes that still rely on “get Mary Jo’s approval”.
Companies that have already done this work, this deathly boring and exceedingly hard work of management. They understand the Work being done in the firm. People know what the processes are. They have data that are clear, with clear data lineages. They have operational excellence, knowing how to get things done in their sphere.
It’s boring work because the benefits of doing this are not very clear. Wouldn’t it be better to invest in this bright-and-shiny new thing, the one that captured the interest of our Board? The one that gets me promoted.
While companies are touting their AI investments and providing press releases, boring firms have already moved ahead with transforming their unexciting operations with this transformative technology. And because it relies on hard management work already being done, the less mature firms can never catch up.
Sure, they can still see big benefits. But only at the individual or simple operations level. Anyone can implement an AI-enabled customer response system that collects data you never knew you could. But you still have to have the management structures in place to implement this new information, to use it to transform your business.
And then there is the problem of so many firms not understanding how work gets done. What work is.
It’s not going to be pretty going forward