Great article and this is a sharp read. What the “93% problem” really exposes isn’t resistance or poor change management, but a lack of clear diagnosis.
Many organizations are trying to integrate AI before they’ve articulated the core obstacle it’s meant to address. The resulting structural chaos isn’t failure, it’s a signal that existing organization and decision models no longer fit. Until leaders treat this as a provisional redesign problem, not an optimization task, culture will keep absorbing the friction (or not).
The chaos isn’t noise. It’s early evidence that the current strategy no longer suits today’s reality.
Since the biggest benefits in cost reduction will occur in each organization's primary production operations, this seems to be the logical starting point. However, equally logical is that most organizations and supporting tech teams have zero experience in developing digital business process and even less knowledge of how identify and reconstruct the now human core processes into agentic bots. Seems a bit like the blind leading the blind.
While each orgnization is unique, there are likely core processes in the major components of knowledge work by industry, say banking or insurance firms, where generic processes could be addressed by pre-fit bots that simply need to be connected and tweaked vs. starting from scratch with each process.
Who is doing this work today? And more importantly, it the work any good?
Great point, Fran. My opening question in almost every discussion now is 'are we thinking big enough?' Yes, there is place for incremental improvement. The risk is a we pave the cow path. And yes, we could reuse bots and agents, and tweak existing ones for our purpose. The risk here is a billion use cases for IT to govern and manage. We are discovering what works and what doesn't live. We are in unchartered waters, and there is value in co-navigating pooling our collective intelligence.
Brilliant as always, Chris. The IBM parallel is spot-on. We're watching the same pattern: organizations realizing the architecture itself is the constraint, not the technology budget. The chaos IS the entropy - systems breaking down because they can't contain what's being added. Thanks for surfacing that connection.
Great article and this is a sharp read. What the “93% problem” really exposes isn’t resistance or poor change management, but a lack of clear diagnosis.
Many organizations are trying to integrate AI before they’ve articulated the core obstacle it’s meant to address. The resulting structural chaos isn’t failure, it’s a signal that existing organization and decision models no longer fit. Until leaders treat this as a provisional redesign problem, not an optimization task, culture will keep absorbing the friction (or not).
The chaos isn’t noise. It’s early evidence that the current strategy no longer suits today’s reality.
Great insights, thank you and glad this resonated, Yetvart!
Since the biggest benefits in cost reduction will occur in each organization's primary production operations, this seems to be the logical starting point. However, equally logical is that most organizations and supporting tech teams have zero experience in developing digital business process and even less knowledge of how identify and reconstruct the now human core processes into agentic bots. Seems a bit like the blind leading the blind.
While each orgnization is unique, there are likely core processes in the major components of knowledge work by industry, say banking or insurance firms, where generic processes could be addressed by pre-fit bots that simply need to be connected and tweaked vs. starting from scratch with each process.
Who is doing this work today? And more importantly, it the work any good?
Great point, Fran. My opening question in almost every discussion now is 'are we thinking big enough?' Yes, there is place for incremental improvement. The risk is a we pave the cow path. And yes, we could reuse bots and agents, and tweak existing ones for our purpose. The risk here is a billion use cases for IT to govern and manage. We are discovering what works and what doesn't live. We are in unchartered waters, and there is value in co-navigating pooling our collective intelligence.
Is this chaos or entropy? It is most-certainly alarming and not at all. Reminds me of the IBM in the 90s...."Are you suggesting we throw money at it?"
Brilliant as always, Chris. The IBM parallel is spot-on. We're watching the same pattern: organizations realizing the architecture itself is the constraint, not the technology budget. The chaos IS the entropy - systems breaking down because they can't contain what's being added. Thanks for surfacing that connection.
Great example, thanks for sharing!