Forget about AI

I ran a workshop at a UK SME this week on AI adoption, where we completely forgot about AI adoption, and instead asked a simple question: "What do you spend most of the time doing repeatedly that you'd like to have done for you?"

A nice easy icebreaker that didn't threaten redundancy or a weeks' training in coding skills.

The people in the room were experts in their work, so as we dug a little deeper, and not only did we find repeatable systems that could be automated, but we identified bottlenecks that could be circumvented or even negated.

Still no mention of AI. Because AI training tends to be generic, rather than built around real people and real work.

So, if you are struggling to find a useful place for AI in your business, stop talking about AI. Instead:

- Find the task everybody hates.

- Find the spreadsheet being copied into another spreadsheet.

- Find the customer inquiry that keeps disappearing.

- Find the report that takes three days to assemble and seven minutes to read.

- Find the bottleneck.

Then, and only then, should you start to introduce the AI, the intelligent, repeatable, automated systems that will make this task dependable, useful or not even required at all.

So forget about AI. Use bottlenecks instead.

If you would like help identifying yours, visit the Success Formula Club and take the free AI Readiness Diagnostic.