11 ms·

It's Always the Process, Stupid

272 points by DocIsInDaHouse 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
softwaredoug 10mo ago
My time working in the search field for 13 years, there is always this trend: Leaders think <buzzy-technique> is a good way to save money, but <buzzy-technique> actually is a thing that requires deeper investment to realize more returns, not a money saver.
- stuartjohnson12 10mo ago
  That's why you need consultants to tell you that <buzzy-technique> has problems, but <rebadged-buzzy-technique> is really how you save money, and that's why working with a <rebadged-buzzy-technique> expert is how you can overhaul your business and manage operational costs.
Lapalux 10mo ago
>It is the first technology that is truly useful for handling unstructured data. >Processes that rely on unstructured data are usually unstructured processes. I appreciate someone succinctly summing up this idea.
- defaultcompany 10mo ago
  This doesn’t ring true to me. Having processes which rely on communication between humans using natural language can of course be either structured or unstructured. Plenty of highly functioning companies existed well before structured data was even a thing.
  - Spooky23 10mo ago
    Technology folks often confuse structured data needed for their computing function as being needed for the business process.
  - yannyu 10mo ago
    Structured data doesn't have be a database. It can be a checklist, a particular working layout, or even just a defined process. Many high functioning companies spent a lot of time on those kinds of things, which became a competitive advantage.
  - wavemode 10mo ago
    "Talk to the vendor and see what they say" is an unstructured process relying on unstructured data. "Ask the vendor this set of 10 compliance questions. We can only buy if they check every box." is a structured process based on structured data. Both kinds of processes have always existed, long before modern technology. Though only the second kind can be reliably automated.
- evrydayhustling 10mo ago
  Best lines in this article. But it doesn't get to IMO a very important point: why can't these processes easily be structured? Here are some good reasons: - Your process interacts with an unstructured external world (physical reality, customer communication, etc.) - Your process interacts with differently structured processes, and unstructured in the best agreed transfer protocol (could be external, like data sources, or even internal between teams with different taxonomies) - Your process must support a wild kind of variability that is not worth categorizing (e.g. every kind of special delivery instruction a customer might provide) Believing you can always solve these with the right taxonomy and process diagram is like believing there is always another manager to complain to. Experienced process design instead pushes semi-structured variability to the edges, acknowledges those edges, and watches them like a hawk for danger. We should ABSOLUTELY be applying those principles more to AI... if anything, AI should help us decouple systems and overreach less on system scope. We should get more comfortable building smaller, well-structured processes that float in an unstructured soup, because it has gotten much cheaper for us to let every process have an unstructured edge.
  - chanux 10mo ago
    This write up on a paper about business process redesign is such a fine read https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moving-off-the-map.html https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moving-off-the-map.html
chrisweekly 10mo ago
> Let’s rip the Band-Aid off immediately: If your underlying business process is a mess, sprinkling "AI dust" on it won’t turn it into gold. It will just speed up the rate at which you generate garbage. In the world of Business IT, we get seduced by the shiny new toy. Right now, that toy is Artificial Intelligence. Boardrooms are buzzing with buzzwords like LLMs, agentic workflows, and generative reasoning. Executives are frantically asking, "What is our AI strategy?" But here is the hard truth: There is no such thing as an AI strategy. There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO). This is well-expressed, and almost certainly true for an overwhelming majority of companies.
- vanschelven 10mo ago
  Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me
  - ashu1461 10mo ago
    Probably the OP might have used LLM's to structure the document, but the sentiment `Automating stupidity = faster stupidity` is a great take away.
  - PaulHoule 10mo ago
    There was a guy who wrote a blog post in that style who was wondering how it was he'd posted hundreds of messages to people on LinkedIn and gotten no replies. There are some people who insist on spamming out splog posts in that style, some of them think they are blogging, not splogging, and maybe they have good intentions but that style screams "SPAM!" and unfortunately people who are writing that don't understand how it comes across.
  - nine_k 10mo ago
    I think parodying the typical LLM style and mannerisms may have become a device (or even a genre) on its own.
  - DocIsInDaHouse 10mo ago
    yep, in fact, I did use LLMs to formulate the text (I used several one, t'il I got the result that I wanted) and tweak some parts of it manually - Here are the prompts that I used: "it's always the process, stupid! In the context of business IT, it is always and only about BPO, nothing else. so if you want to be successful implementing AI in the enterprise context, you have to handle it like every other software tool: look at your processes and find out how AI, agentic or not, can help optimize the process or help build a better process. Like every technology, AI dont make more intelligent, it only makes faster write me a blog post to express this ideas" and i added this in a second step "i need to integrate another idea: AI is very good at handling unstructured data, in fact, it's the first tool that is very useful for that. But most processes that uses unstructured data are not documented, as they are also often unstructured. So to implement AI in processes, we must improve our process design" Fact: when you know what you want to achieve, AI can be very useful, especially for lazy people like me ;)
Starlevel004 10mo ago
LinkedIn Standard English, tab closed
zkmon 10mo ago
This should go to all CEOs. They should realize that the real problem AI solves is handling of text and unstructured data. That is the core ability. But I don't blame them. Process optimization is hard. If a new tool promises more speed, without changing the process, they are ready to pour money at that.
- watermelon0 10mo ago
  Text and unstructured data is mainly related to NLP/LLM, not to the AI as a whole.
  - zkmon 10mo ago
    If you take out LLM (text/img/voice processing) from all the models, I'm curious to know, what else is left that can be called as AI today?
- Spooky23 10mo ago
  Well, that’s a pretty powerful capability. I recently did a pilot project where we reduced the time for a high friction IT Request process from 4 day fulfillment to about 6 business hours. By “handing text and unstructured data”, the process was able to determine user intent, identify key areas of ambiguity that would delay the request, and eliminate the ambiguity based on data we have (90%) or by asking a yes/no question to someone. All using GCP tools integrating with a service platform, our ERP and other data sources. Total time ~3 weeks, although we cheated because we understood both the problem and process.
  - orev 10mo ago
    I suspect that could have also been accomplished without any kind of AI. Most processes are inefficient simply because nobody has taken the time to optimize them (and rightly so if they’re not used often enough to justify the time; premature optimization and all that). The act of simply deciding to optimize something, and then looking at it, usually results in significant gains just because of that, regardless of what tools were used.
NoNameHaveI 10mo ago
I am compelled to quote Fred Brooks: "There is no silver bullet". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
1970-01-01 10mo ago
Yet another blogger conflating AI with LLMs again. AI will absolutely transform your business process if you're not yet another software shop vibing container deployment scenarios. ex: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/10/researchers-invent-new-ai-tool-to-automate-detection-of-cancer-in-blood-samples/ https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/10/researchers-inven...
- notpachet 10mo ago
  How is what you linked a business process? Cancer identification is a step in a larger process, specifically the "analyze unstructured data" part that the author alludes to. AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails. "Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?" - Russ Ackoff
  - 1970-01-01 10mo ago
    Hi Russ, Did you read the example? The business process of human bias is gone in the cancer detective phase. AI eliminated it.
    - notpachet 10mo ago
      Cancer detection is not a process. That's a discrete step in a process. My name isn't Russ. Russ Ackoff was a business process optimization leader from the last century -- a contemporary of Deming and the Toyota school etc.
      - 1970-01-01 10mo ago
        The article mentions other steps are changing due to AI. It's a ship of Thesus result. Multiple steps are changing, some are eliminated, some are still needed, yet the overall name of the process (cancer detection) doesn't change.
wolfi1 10mo ago
I've seen several serveral introduction of new ERPs in companies, usually they wanted the same processes they had just with the new software, the customizing turned out be a nightmare as the consultants usually accpeted their wishes and the programmers had to bend the ERP-system accordingly, never was in budget or in time
ashu1461 10mo ago
I think there is one counter argument, LLMs are speeding up everything, including the speed of learning, which also implies that companies that might have bad processes would learn and move to good processes as well on the way. Example, one of many things, in our SDLC process, now we have test cases and documentation which never existed before (coming from a startup).
alexpotato 10mo ago
One of my favorite stories about processes and documentation: - Work at a hedge fund - Every evening, the whole firm "cycles" to start the next trading day - Step 7 of 18 fails - I document Step 7 and then show it to a bunch of folks - I end up having a meeting where I say: "Two things are true: 1. You all agree that Step 7 is incorrectly documented. 2. You all DISAGREE on what Step 7 should be doing" I love this story as it highlights that JUST WRITING DOWN what's happening can be a giant leap forward in terms of getting people to agree on what the process actually IS. If you don't write it down, everyone may go on basing decisions on an incorrect understanding of the system. A related story: "As I was writing the documentation on our market data system, multiple people told me 'You don't need to do that, it's not that complicated'. Then they read the final document and said 'Oh, I guess it is pretty complicated' "
- Telaneo 10mo ago
  I've been in discussions about Step 7, and my god, the experience was soul crushing. Even more soul crushing was that the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done. Writing stuff down is great since it provides a baseline to agree upon, and later additions to the team will take it as given and not start to discuss minutiae and bog down discussions into nothingness. And if some point really is worth discussing, it shouldn't be hard to find support to change it. I've heard some wild misunderstandings of how things were based on how they were being done, and now I never want to do anything of any significant size without there being a clear and obvious process to it.
  - alexpotato 10mo ago
    > the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done. In Charlie Beckwith's book about Delta Force [0] there is a line where he says (paraphrasing): "The SAS never wanted to write down what their role was and what tasks they were trained for. Why? Because they didn't want to get pigeon holed into a role. ... They also never wrote down their SOPs b/c the argument was that 'if you can't keep it in your head, you shouldn't be in the Regiment'. At Delta, we were going to write down our mission AND write down our SOPs." 0 - https://amzn.to/4ahIAJV https://amzn.to/4ahIAJV
crims0n 10mo ago
I have complicated feelings towards process, especially in large enterprises. In one hand, I know process is how you get good work out of average people - and that has a lot of value in big businesses because statistically, most people are going to be around average. On the other hand, I have seen process stifle above average people or so called “rockstars”. The thing is, the bigger your reliance on process, the more you need these people to swoop in and fill in the cracks, save the day when things go horribly wrong, and otherwise be the glue that keeps things running (or perhaps oil for the machine is more apt). I know it’s not “fair”, and certainly not without risk, but the best way I have (personally) seen it work is where the above average people get special permissions such as global admin or exception from the change management process (as examples) to remove some of the friction process brings. These people like to move fast and stay focused, and don’t like being bogged down by petty paperwork, or sitting on a bridge asking permission to do this or that. Even as a manger, I don’t blame them at all, and all things being equal so long as they are not causing problems I think the business would prefer them to operate as they do. In light of those observations, I have been wrestling a lot with what it says about process itself. Still undecided.
- NeutralForest 10mo ago
  The Agile Manifesto says "People over process", this can be interpreted in many ways. But ideally you follow the 80/20 rule and have clear cut processes for the most frequent cases and/or liability/law/SLA stuff you can't do without. But you should have fast escape hatches as well imo where a good engineer having admin access on a platform or deploying a hot-fix is also possible.
- tetha 10mo ago
  One thing process protects against is lazy people. Like, we recently had an incident where someone just pasted "401 - URL" into the description and sent it off. We recently asked someone to open the incident through the correct channels. We got a service request "Fix" with the mail thread attached to it in a format we couldn't open. We get incidents "System is slow, infrastructure is problem" from random "DevOps" people. Sadly, that is the crap you need to deal with. This is the crap that grinds away cooperative culture by pure abuse. Before a certain dysfunctional project was dumped on us as "Make it Saas", people were happy to support ad-hoc, ambitious and strange things. We are now forced by this project to enforce procedure and if this kills great ideas and adventures, so be it. The crappy, out-of-process things cost too much time.
andai 10mo ago
>They think artificial intelligence brings intelligence. It doesn't. What does it bring?
- NebulaStorm456 10mo ago
  If your answer requires clustering and assembling disparate facts strewn about on the internet or company data / documents and reasoning over them, then LLMs can help that. Atleast that's what I did when I used to answer questions on stackoverflow.
  - zahlman 10mo ago
    You did read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 , yes?
    - NebulaStorm456 10mo ago
      My point was before AI, when I used to answer stackoverflow questions out of curiosity, I used to manually search around on internet to properly answer the question. This is exactly the process LLMs help with.
andai 10mo ago
>If you automate a stupid decision, you just make stupid decisions at light speed. What's the prompt for that one? ;)
torben-friis 10mo ago
I’m like 99% sure that text is llm-written. “Mess/gold” comparisons, meta paragraph expressions like “here is the truth”, “it’s not this, it’s that”…
- lhmiles 10mo ago
  Yeah
- subpixel 10mo ago
  It’s written in English by a German-speaking author. That could be the odd lilt you sense.
jsrozner 10mo ago
This is AI generated, which is annoying.
ronbenton 10mo ago
I have done general process automation work (usually designing new web-based tools) for 20 years now. The underlying idea has always applied, even before AI: if your process is ill-defined and/or nonsensical, trying to "automate" it isn't going to work out. I have seen a smattering of instances along the way where the act of defining requirements forced companies to define processes better. Usually, though, companies are unwilling to do this and instead will insist on adding flexibility to the automation tooling, to the point where the tool is of no help.
- Waterluvian 10mo ago
  I think this is what I’m running into. Other teams want my team to make tooling to simplify some data processing workflow. Nice UIs and such. But they can’t and generally won’t show me the written-down process for how it’s actually done today. Or how they’re going to do it manually as they develop their side of things. Which leads us to turning into a different team: we have to go figure out what the process engineering even is, which means becoming a bigger expert than they are at the process they want us to make tooling for.
DenisM 10mo ago
> There is no such thing as an AI strategy. There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO). Here’s your Ai strategy: every few months re-evaluate agent fitness and start switching over. Remember backstops and canaries. Details: Businesses usually assign responsibilities to somewhat flaky employees, with understanding there will be a percentage of errors. This works ok so long as errors don’t fluctuate wildly and don’t amplify through the system. Most business processes are a mess and that works ok. Once agents become less flaky and there are enough backstops to contain occasional damage business will start switching.
- zbentley 10mo ago
  Bold presumption that businesses have any useful way to evaluate agent fitness. Hell, they struggle to evaluate human fitness and do basic things like plan and execute OKRs. What makes you think they’d be any good at continuous quality improvement on entities that can’t correctly explain their own reasoning?
  - DenisM 10mo ago
    Good point. There will be a mixture of those who succeeded accidentally, or by taking calculated risks, Or by virtue of sill holding their shot together. Drawin will chew up the rest, which might be the majority.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
siliconc0w 10mo ago
The other nuance is that by definition all of these undocumented workflows are out-of-distribution for the model - so it won't be particularly great at them.
nishantjani10 10mo ago
"Processes that rely on unstructured data are usually unstructured processes." - thats a brilliant take, seriously!
lhmiles 10mo ago
This is terrible advice. Legibilizing everything illegible is a fast way to ruin everything, especially culture
cyrusradfar 10mo ago
I agree with the article’s core point that placement matters. The useful framing is not “where can we bolt on AI” but “what does the system look like if AI is a first-class component.” That requires mapping the workflow, identifying the decision points, and separating deterministic steps from judgment calls. Most teams try to apply AI inside existing org boundaries. That assumes the current structure is optimal. The better approach is to model the business as a set of subsystems, pick the one with the highest operational cost or latency, and simulate what happens if that subsystem becomes an order of magnitude more efficient. The rest of the architecture tends to reconfigure from that starting point. For example, in insurance (just an illustration, not a claim about any specific firm), underwriting, sales, and support dominate cost. If underwriting throughput improves by an order of magnitude, the downstream constraints shift: pricing cycles compress, risk models refresh faster, and the human-in-the-loop boundary moves. That’s the level where AI changes the system shape and acts beyond the local workflow. This lens seems more productive than incremental insertion into existing silos.
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
I feel like this article hits the nail on the head. I have learned to be careful of "too much process", but I find that the need for structure never disappears. AI deals well with structure. You can adjust your structure to accept less-structured data, but you still need the structure, for after that. Just maybe not too much structure[0]. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/various/concrete-galoshes/ https://littlegreenviper.com/various/concrete-galoshes/
BinaryIgor 10mo ago
"There is no such thing as an AI strategy. There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO)." Exactly, that's the fundamental truth. The shiny tool of the day doesn't change it at all
wallfacer 10mo ago
One core assertion seems less true every day: > The intelligence (knowing what a "risk" actually means) still requires human governance. Less and less. Why do you trust a human who’s considered 5000 assessments to better understand “risks” and process the next 50 better than the LLM who has internalized untold millions of assessments?
scrubs 10mo ago
Totally agree with this post. I've had many hour convos with a program manager on his project (an enterprise security master for trading) where AI has been misapplied to make the mess a bigger mess as just one current example in my own backyard.
idopmstuff 10mo ago
I have always found writing documentation to be incredibly helpful for clarifying my thinking. It prevents me from doing mental hand-waving around details, and often times writing down a process that I have done a thousand times is the thing that makes me realize how I can cut steps or improve it. I'm now in the process of trying to hand off chunks of the work I do to run my business to AI (both to save time but also just as my very broad, practical eval). It really is all about documentation. I buy small e-commerce brands, and they're simple enough that current SOTA models have more than enough intelligence to take a first pass at listings + financials to determine whether I should take a call with the seller. To make that work, though, I've got a prompt that's currently at six pages that is just every single thing I look when evaluating a business codified. Using that has really convinced me that people are overrating the importance of intelligence in LLMs in terms of driving real economic value. Most work is like my evaluations - it requires intelligence, but there's a ceiling to how much you need. Someone with 150 IQ points wouldn't do any better at this task than someone with 100 IQ points. Instead, I think what's going to drive actual change is the scaffolding that lets LLMs take on increasing numbers of tasks. My big issue right now is that I have to go to the listing page for a business that's for sale, screenshot the page, download the files, upload that all to ChatGPT and then give it the prompt. I'm still waiting for a web browsing agent that can handle all of that for me, so I can automate the full flow and just get an analysis of each listing sent to me without having to do anything.
- grvdrm 10mo ago
  Question: could you use something like (example) Selenium to perform some or all of those pre-LLM tasks?
  - idopmstuff 10mo ago
    I could (I mean in theory - practically, I'm not technically proficient enough to do so), and in fact one of the most promising web browsing agents I've tested is director.ai, which just writes Stagehand code on the fly to achieve the objectives you give it. Unfortunately it can't be invoked via API yet, so doesn't work for my use case. Honestly, it takes such a relatively small amount of time that it makes sense to just do it myself until there's an agent that can easily handle it; I'm really only spending time trying to automate it now as a test of AI capabilities. If I actually wanted to get it automated tomorrow, the most time-efficient way to do that would just be to involve a VA from somewhere cheap for the work I'm doing.
zoom6628 10mo ago
Great article. I think of AI when considering where and how to use as Automated Intelligence and when thinking about risk AI can also mean Accelerated Incompetence. Which end of this scale you end up on depends on taking the hype or systems thinking approach to the opportunity/problem being addressed.

272 points by DocIsInDaHouse 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

My time working in the search field for 13 years, there is always this trend: Leaders think <buzzy-technique> is a good way to save money, but <buzzy-technique> actually is a thing that requires deeper investment to realize more returns, not a money saver.

stuartjohnson12 10mo ago
That's why you need consultants to tell you that <buzzy-technique> has problems, but <rebadged-buzzy-technique> is really how you save money, and that's why working with a <rebadged-buzzy-technique> expert is how you can overhaul your business and manage operational costs.

Lapalux 10mo ago

>It is the first technology that is truly useful for handling unstructured data. >Processes that rely on unstructured data are usually unstructured processes. I appreciate someone succinctly summing up this idea.

defaultcompany 10mo ago
This doesn’t ring true to me. Having processes which rely on communication between humans using natural language can of course be either structured or unstructured. Plenty of highly functioning companies existed well before structured data was even a thing.
- Spooky23 10mo ago
  Technology folks often confuse structured data needed for their computing function as being needed for the business process.
- yannyu 10mo ago
  Structured data doesn't have be a database. It can be a checklist, a particular working layout, or even just a defined process. Many high functioning companies spent a lot of time on those kinds of things, which became a competitive advantage.
- wavemode 10mo ago
  "Talk to the vendor and see what they say" is an unstructured process relying on unstructured data. "Ask the vendor this set of 10 compliance questions. We can only buy if they check every box." is a structured process based on structured data. Both kinds of processes have always existed, long before modern technology. Though only the second kind can be reliably automated.
evrydayhustling 10mo ago
Best lines in this article. But it doesn't get to IMO a very important point: why can't these processes easily be structured? Here are some good reasons: - Your process interacts with an unstructured external world (physical reality, customer communication, etc.) - Your process interacts with differently structured processes, and unstructured in the best agreed transfer protocol (could be external, like data sources, or even internal between teams with different taxonomies) - Your process must support a wild kind of variability that is not worth categorizing (e.g. every kind of special delivery instruction a customer might provide) Believing you can always solve these with the right taxonomy and process diagram is like believing there is always another manager to complain to. Experienced process design instead pushes semi-structured variability to the edges, acknowledges those edges, and watches them like a hawk for danger. We should ABSOLUTELY be applying those principles more to AI... if anything, AI should help us decouple systems and overreach less on system scope. We should get more comfortable building smaller, well-structured processes that float in an unstructured soup, because it has gotten much cheaper for us to let every process have an unstructured edge.
- chanux 10mo ago
  This write up on a paper about business process redesign is such a fine read https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moving-off-the-map.html https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moving-off-the-map.html

chrisweekly 10mo ago

> Let’s rip the Band-Aid off immediately: If your underlying business process is a mess, sprinkling "AI dust" on it won’t turn it into gold. It will just speed up the rate at which you generate garbage. In the world of Business IT, we get seduced by the shiny new toy. Right now, that toy is Artificial Intelligence. Boardrooms are buzzing with buzzwords like LLMs, agentic workflows, and generative reasoning. Executives are frantically asking, "What is our AI strategy?" But here is the hard truth: There is no such thing as an AI strategy. There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO). This is well-expressed, and almost certainly true for an overwhelming majority of companies.

vanschelven 10mo ago
Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me
- ashu1461 10mo ago
  Probably the OP might have used LLM's to structure the document, but the sentiment `Automating stupidity = faster stupidity` is a great take away.
- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  There was a guy who wrote a blog post in that style who was wondering how it was he'd posted hundreds of messages to people on LinkedIn and gotten no replies. There are some people who insist on spamming out splog posts in that style, some of them think they are blogging, not splogging, and maybe they have good intentions but that style screams "SPAM!" and unfortunately people who are writing that don't understand how it comes across.
- nine_k 10mo ago
  I think parodying the typical LLM style and mannerisms may have become a device (or even a genre) on its own.
- DocIsInDaHouse 10mo ago
  yep, in fact, I did use LLMs to formulate the text (I used several one, t'il I got the result that I wanted) and tweak some parts of it manually - Here are the prompts that I used: "it's always the process, stupid! In the context of business IT, it is always and only about BPO, nothing else. so if you want to be successful implementing AI in the enterprise context, you have to handle it like every other software tool: look at your processes and find out how AI, agentic or not, can help optimize the process or help build a better process. Like every technology, AI dont make more intelligent, it only makes faster write me a blog post to express this ideas" and i added this in a second step "i need to integrate another idea: AI is very good at handling unstructured data, in fact, it's the first tool that is very useful for that. But most processes that uses unstructured data are not documented, as they are also often unstructured. So to implement AI in processes, we must improve our process design" Fact: when you know what you want to achieve, AI can be very useful, especially for lazy people like me ;)

Starlevel004 10mo ago

LinkedIn Standard English, tab closed

zkmon 10mo ago

This should go to all CEOs. They should realize that the real problem AI solves is handling of text and unstructured data. That is the core ability. But I don't blame them. Process optimization is hard. If a new tool promises more speed, without changing the process, they are ready to pour money at that.

watermelon0 10mo ago
Text and unstructured data is mainly related to NLP/LLM, not to the AI as a whole.
- zkmon 10mo ago
  If you take out LLM (text/img/voice processing) from all the models, I'm curious to know, what else is left that can be called as AI today?
Spooky23 10mo ago
Well, that’s a pretty powerful capability. I recently did a pilot project where we reduced the time for a high friction IT Request process from 4 day fulfillment to about 6 business hours. By “handing text and unstructured data”, the process was able to determine user intent, identify key areas of ambiguity that would delay the request, and eliminate the ambiguity based on data we have (90%) or by asking a yes/no question to someone. All using GCP tools integrating with a service platform, our ERP and other data sources. Total time ~3 weeks, although we cheated because we understood both the problem and process.
- orev 10mo ago
  I suspect that could have also been accomplished without any kind of AI. Most processes are inefficient simply because nobody has taken the time to optimize them (and rightly so if they’re not used often enough to justify the time; premature optimization and all that). The act of simply deciding to optimize something, and then looking at it, usually results in significant gains just because of that, regardless of what tools were used.

NoNameHaveI 10mo ago

I am compelled to quote Fred Brooks: "There is no silver bullet". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

1970-01-01 10mo ago

Yet another blogger conflating AI with LLMs again. AI will absolutely transform your business process if you're not yet another software shop vibing container deployment scenarios. ex: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/10/researchers-invent-new-ai-tool-to-automate-detection-of-cancer-in-blood-samples/ https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/10/researchers-inven...

notpachet 10mo ago
How is what you linked a business process? Cancer identification is a step in a larger process, specifically the "analyze unstructured data" part that the author alludes to. AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails. "Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?" - Russ Ackoff
- 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  Hi Russ, Did you read the example? The business process of human bias is gone in the cancer detective phase. AI eliminated it.
  - notpachet 10mo ago
    Cancer detection is not a process. That's a discrete step in a process. My name isn't Russ. Russ Ackoff was a business process optimization leader from the last century -- a contemporary of Deming and the Toyota school etc.
    - 1970-01-01 10mo ago
      The article mentions other steps are changing due to AI. It's a ship of Thesus result. Multiple steps are changing, some are eliminated, some are still needed, yet the overall name of the process (cancer detection) doesn't change.

wolfi1 10mo ago

I've seen several serveral introduction of new ERPs in companies, usually they wanted the same processes they had just with the new software, the customizing turned out be a nightmare as the consultants usually accpeted their wishes and the programmers had to bend the ERP-system accordingly, never was in budget or in time

ashu1461 10mo ago

I think there is one counter argument, LLMs are speeding up everything, including the speed of learning, which also implies that companies that might have bad processes would learn and move to good processes as well on the way. Example, one of many things, in our SDLC process, now we have test cases and documentation which never existed before (coming from a startup).

alexpotato 10mo ago

One of my favorite stories about processes and documentation: - Work at a hedge fund - Every evening, the whole firm "cycles" to start the next trading day - Step 7 of 18 fails - I document Step 7 and then show it to a bunch of folks - I end up having a meeting where I say: "Two things are true: 1. You all agree that Step 7 is incorrectly documented. 2. You all DISAGREE on what Step 7 should be doing" I love this story as it highlights that JUST WRITING DOWN what's happening can be a giant leap forward in terms of getting people to agree on what the process actually IS. If you don't write it down, everyone may go on basing decisions on an incorrect understanding of the system. A related story: "As I was writing the documentation on our market data system, multiple people told me 'You don't need to do that, it's not that complicated'. Then they read the final document and said 'Oh, I guess it is pretty complicated' "

Telaneo 10mo ago
I've been in discussions about Step 7, and my god, the experience was soul crushing. Even more soul crushing was that the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done. Writing stuff down is great since it provides a baseline to agree upon, and later additions to the team will take it as given and not start to discuss minutiae and bog down discussions into nothingness. And if some point really is worth discussing, it shouldn't be hard to find support to change it. I've heard some wild misunderstandings of how things were based on how they were being done, and now I never want to do anything of any significant size without there being a clear and obvious process to it.
- alexpotato 10mo ago
  > the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done. In Charlie Beckwith's book about Delta Force [0] there is a line where he says (paraphrasing): "The SAS never wanted to write down what their role was and what tasks they were trained for. Why? Because they didn't want to get pigeon holed into a role. ... They also never wrote down their SOPs b/c the argument was that 'if you can't keep it in your head, you shouldn't be in the Regiment'. At Delta, we were going to write down our mission AND write down our SOPs." 0 - https://amzn.to/4ahIAJV https://amzn.to/4ahIAJV

crims0n 10mo ago

I have complicated feelings towards process, especially in large enterprises. In one hand, I know process is how you get good work out of average people - and that has a lot of value in big businesses because statistically, most people are going to be around average. On the other hand, I have seen process stifle above average people or so called “rockstars”. The thing is, the bigger your reliance on process, the more you need these people to swoop in and fill in the cracks, save the day when things go horribly wrong, and otherwise be the glue that keeps things running (or perhaps oil for the machine is more apt). I know it’s not “fair”, and certainly not without risk, but the best way I have (personally) seen it work is where the above average people get special permissions such as global admin or exception from the change management process (as examples) to remove some of the friction process brings. These people like to move fast and stay focused, and don’t like being bogged down by petty paperwork, or sitting on a bridge asking permission to do this or that. Even as a manger, I don’t blame them at all, and all things being equal so long as they are not causing problems I think the business would prefer them to operate as they do. In light of those observations, I have been wrestling a lot with what it says about process itself. Still undecided.

NeutralForest 10mo ago
The Agile Manifesto says "People over process", this can be interpreted in many ways. But ideally you follow the 80/20 rule and have clear cut processes for the most frequent cases and/or liability/law/SLA stuff you can't do without. But you should have fast escape hatches as well imo where a good engineer having admin access on a platform or deploying a hot-fix is also possible.
tetha 10mo ago
One thing process protects against is lazy people. Like, we recently had an incident where someone just pasted "401 - URL" into the description and sent it off. We recently asked someone to open the incident through the correct channels. We got a service request "Fix" with the mail thread attached to it in a format we couldn't open. We get incidents "System is slow, infrastructure is problem" from random "DevOps" people. Sadly, that is the crap you need to deal with. This is the crap that grinds away cooperative culture by pure abuse. Before a certain dysfunctional project was dumped on us as "Make it Saas", people were happy to support ad-hoc, ambitious and strange things. We are now forced by this project to enforce procedure and if this kills great ideas and adventures, so be it. The crappy, out-of-process things cost too much time.

andai 10mo ago

>They think artificial intelligence brings intelligence. It doesn't. What does it bring?

NebulaStorm456 10mo ago
If your answer requires clustering and assembling disparate facts strewn about on the internet or company data / documents and reasoning over them, then LLMs can help that. Atleast that's what I did when I used to answer questions on stackoverflow.
- zahlman 10mo ago
  You did read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 , yes?
  - NebulaStorm456 10mo ago
    My point was before AI, when I used to answer stackoverflow questions out of curiosity, I used to manually search around on internet to properly answer the question. This is exactly the process LLMs help with.

andai 10mo ago

>If you automate a stupid decision, you just make stupid decisions at light speed. What's the prompt for that one? ;)

torben-friis 10mo ago

I’m like 99% sure that text is llm-written. “Mess/gold” comparisons, meta paragraph expressions like “here is the truth”, “it’s not this, it’s that”…

lhmiles 10mo ago
Yeah
subpixel 10mo ago
It’s written in English by a German-speaking author. That could be the odd lilt you sense.

jsrozner 10mo ago

This is AI generated, which is annoying.

ronbenton 10mo ago

I have done general process automation work (usually designing new web-based tools) for 20 years now. The underlying idea has always applied, even before AI: if your process is ill-defined and/or nonsensical, trying to "automate" it isn't going to work out. I have seen a smattering of instances along the way where the act of defining requirements forced companies to define processes better. Usually, though, companies are unwilling to do this and instead will insist on adding flexibility to the automation tooling, to the point where the tool is of no help.

Waterluvian 10mo ago
I think this is what I’m running into. Other teams want my team to make tooling to simplify some data processing workflow. Nice UIs and such. But they can’t and generally won’t show me the written-down process for how it’s actually done today. Or how they’re going to do it manually as they develop their side of things. Which leads us to turning into a different team: we have to go figure out what the process engineering even is, which means becoming a bigger expert than they are at the process they want us to make tooling for.

DenisM 10mo ago

> There is no such thing as an AI strategy. There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO). Here’s your Ai strategy: every few months re-evaluate agent fitness and start switching over. Remember backstops and canaries. Details: Businesses usually assign responsibilities to somewhat flaky employees, with understanding there will be a percentage of errors. This works ok so long as errors don’t fluctuate wildly and don’t amplify through the system. Most business processes are a mess and that works ok. Once agents become less flaky and there are enough backstops to contain occasional damage business will start switching.

zbentley 10mo ago
Bold presumption that businesses have any useful way to evaluate agent fitness. Hell, they struggle to evaluate human fitness and do basic things like plan and execute OKRs. What makes you think they’d be any good at continuous quality improvement on entities that can’t correctly explain their own reasoning?
- DenisM 10mo ago
  Good point. There will be a mixture of those who succeeded accidentally, or by taking calculated risks, Or by virtue of sill holding their shot together. Drawin will chew up the rest, which might be the majority.

deleted 10mo ago

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siliconc0w 10mo ago

The other nuance is that by definition all of these undocumented workflows are out-of-distribution for the model - so it won't be particularly great at them.

nishantjani10 10mo ago

"Processes that rely on unstructured data are usually unstructured processes." - thats a brilliant take, seriously!

lhmiles 10mo ago

This is terrible advice. Legibilizing everything illegible is a fast way to ruin everything, especially culture

cyrusradfar 10mo ago

I agree with the article’s core point that placement matters. The useful framing is not “where can we bolt on AI” but “what does the system look like if AI is a first-class component.” That requires mapping the workflow, identifying the decision points, and separating deterministic steps from judgment calls. Most teams try to apply AI inside existing org boundaries. That assumes the current structure is optimal. The better approach is to model the business as a set of subsystems, pick the one with the highest operational cost or latency, and simulate what happens if that subsystem becomes an order of magnitude more efficient. The rest of the architecture tends to reconfigure from that starting point. For example, in insurance (just an illustration, not a claim about any specific firm), underwriting, sales, and support dominate cost. If underwriting throughput improves by an order of magnitude, the downstream constraints shift: pricing cycles compress, risk models refresh faster, and the human-in-the-loop boundary moves. That’s the level where AI changes the system shape and acts beyond the local workflow. This lens seems more productive than incremental insertion into existing silos.

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago

I feel like this article hits the nail on the head. I have learned to be careful of "too much process", but I find that the need for structure never disappears. AI deals well with structure. You can adjust your structure to accept less-structured data, but you still need the structure, for after that. Just maybe not too much structure[0]. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/various/concrete-galoshes/ https://littlegreenviper.com/various/concrete-galoshes/

BinaryIgor 10mo ago

"There is no such thing as an AI strategy. There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO)." Exactly, that's the fundamental truth. The shiny tool of the day doesn't change it at all

wallfacer 10mo ago

One core assertion seems less true every day: > The intelligence (knowing what a "risk" actually means) still requires human governance. Less and less. Why do you trust a human who’s considered 5000 assessments to better understand “risks” and process the next 50 better than the LLM who has internalized untold millions of assessments?

scrubs 10mo ago

Totally agree with this post. I've had many hour convos with a program manager on his project (an enterprise security master for trading) where AI has been misapplied to make the mess a bigger mess as just one current example in my own backyard.

idopmstuff 10mo ago

I have always found writing documentation to be incredibly helpful for clarifying my thinking. It prevents me from doing mental hand-waving around details, and often times writing down a process that I have done a thousand times is the thing that makes me realize how I can cut steps or improve it. I'm now in the process of trying to hand off chunks of the work I do to run my business to AI (both to save time but also just as my very broad, practical eval). It really is all about documentation. I buy small e-commerce brands, and they're simple enough that current SOTA models have more than enough intelligence to take a first pass at listings + financials to determine whether I should take a call with the seller. To make that work, though, I've got a prompt that's currently at six pages that is just every single thing I look when evaluating a business codified. Using that has really convinced me that people are overrating the importance of intelligence in LLMs in terms of driving real economic value. Most work is like my evaluations - it requires intelligence, but there's a ceiling to how much you need. Someone with 150 IQ points wouldn't do any better at this task than someone with 100 IQ points. Instead, I think what's going to drive actual change is the scaffolding that lets LLMs take on increasing numbers of tasks. My big issue right now is that I have to go to the listing page for a business that's for sale, screenshot the page, download the files, upload that all to ChatGPT and then give it the prompt. I'm still waiting for a web browsing agent that can handle all of that for me, so I can automate the full flow and just get an analysis of each listing sent to me without having to do anything.

grvdrm 10mo ago
Question: could you use something like (example) Selenium to perform some or all of those pre-LLM tasks?
- idopmstuff 10mo ago
  I could (I mean in theory - practically, I'm not technically proficient enough to do so), and in fact one of the most promising web browsing agents I've tested is director.ai, which just writes Stagehand code on the fly to achieve the objectives you give it. Unfortunately it can't be invoked via API yet, so doesn't work for my use case. Honestly, it takes such a relatively small amount of time that it makes sense to just do it myself until there's an agent that can easily handle it; I'm really only spending time trying to automate it now as a test of AI capabilities. If I actually wanted to get it automated tomorrow, the most time-efficient way to do that would just be to involve a VA from somewhere cheap for the work I'm doing.

zoom6628 10mo ago

Great article. I think of AI when considering where and how to use as Automated Intelligence and when thinking about risk AI can also mean Accelerated Incompetence. Which end of this scale you end up on depends on taking the hype or systems thinking approach to the opportunity/problem being addressed.