4 ms·

> 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

> 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 11mo ago
Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me
- ashu1461 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  I think parodying the typical LLM style and mannerisms may have become a device (or even a genre) on its own.
- DocIsInDaHouse 11mo 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 ;)
  - wizzwizz4 11mo ago
    This is a lot easier to read than the blog post.
wavemode 11mo ago
A similar observation commonly comes up related to software development - "it's not tech debt, it's org debt" (or to put a different way, "trying to use a technical solution to solve a social problem").
- __MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
  I hear that one a lot but pretty frequently it's applied to "social problems" which were caused by technology. It seems to imply some kind of technology/society boundary which doesn't actually exist.
  - DocTomoe 11mo ago
    Mild disagree. The saying "you can't solve social problems with technology" usually means - at least in the places I have heard / used it - "If your workforce fights a process - be it for the process being stupid, tools being slow, incentives do not align with policy, whatever - especially a control step, no amount of mandatory tech enforcement of that process step will yield better results." At best you get garbled data because someone hit the keyboard to fill in mandatory fields, sometimes, the process now works OUTSIDE of the system by informal methods because 'work still needs to be done', at worst, you get a mutiny. You have to fix the people(s' problems) by actually talking to them and take the pain points away, you do not go to 'computer says no' territory first. In my experience, no org problem is only social, and no tech problem is merely technical. Finding a sustainable solution in both fields is what distinguishes a staff engineer from a junior consultant.
    - ozim 11mo ago
      Another point of view on that. I work on SaaS platform as engineer. We can have some people from customer A asking for bunch of fields to be mandatory - just to get 6 months later people from that company nagging about the fields saying our platform sucks - well no their process and requirements suck - we didn’t come up which fields are mandatory.
    - criemen 11mo ago
Aperocky 11mo ago
It can both be Business Process Optimization and an AI strategy. In fact, if an AI strategy becomes business process optimization, I'd say that AI strategy for that company is successful. There are too many AI strategy today that isn't even business process optimization and detached from bottom line, and just being pure FOMO from the C suite. Those probably won't end well.
ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved. The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving themselves all the money that would've gone to whatever is now dead. Repeat this process for 30 years and you have companies like Microsoft that can barely ship anything that works anymore, and our 4 Big Websites frequently just fail to load pages for no explicable reason, Amazon goes down and takes 1/3 of the internet with it, and AI companies are now going to devour the carcass of our internet and shit it back to us in LLM waffle while charging us money for the privilege to eat it.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 11mo ago
  Honestly, I don't know if throwing people at a problem is the way to go. Doubly so given that a good chunk of the projects lately for me deal with third party vendors and those are so .. embedded that even getting basic requirements, documentation is an uphill battle ( which -- to me -- seems insane ). I have zero pull so I do what I can, notate the insanity for cya and move on. I do agree on execs congratulating themselves afterwards though. It was obscene last year. This year it was mildly muted.
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    You can always throw other things at those people instead.
  - jjk166 11mo ago
    Throwing people at a problem is very different from allocating an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people. A small but skilled team can accomplish a lot, whereas a lot of the wrong people can't do much at all. Generally there are more than enough warm bodies available, big companies are full of those, the issue is that skilled people aren't fungible - the team of 12 working on this project seems to be moving at a snails pace because really it's two people, both of whom are split across several other projects simultaneously, doing the real work and everyone else doing stuff that is likely unnecessary if not straight up counterproductive. It takes skill, effort and discipline to cultivate a team that actually has all the skills it needs to succeed, in the form of people who mutually work well together, to keep these people around over an extended period of time, and not try to split them up onto different projects and plug the gaps with the wrong people.
TimPC 11mo ago
I feel like this is an inside view from the BPO community and the only part of AI they see is the part that affects BPO. But for most businesses AI strategy is not about AI for internal use but AI to either improve customer funnels or launch new products. Most of the companies I've talked to in the past year wanted a strategy for customer facing AI not internal AI.
- wizzwizz4 11mo ago
  LLMs do not improve customer funnels. Well-designed decision-trees can, but we're not calling those "AI" at the moment.
- bathtub365 11mo ago
  The last time a company put an AI chat bot between me and actual customer service it didn’t listen to my problem and hallucinated something I didn’t say.
bluecheese452 11mo ago
There is an ai strategy if you are selling hype instead of products.
wombatpm 11mo ago
I worked for a fortune 300 company that engaged in a Business Process Redesign initiative. After spending 90 million on the project they pulled the plug. My takeaway was that the project was doomed because it was named wrong. Should have been called Business Process Design. They are now owned by Private Equity. I can only wonder what madness the would have wrought with AI. They tried to implement a system whereby a customer has a single customer number. Between mergers, acquisitions and shutdowns it was impossible to keep straight and keep tracking history. It impacted rates, contracts, sales commissions, division revenue-everything. In they end they gave everyone a new number while still using the old ones.
- xnx 11mo ago
  Relevant in so many contexts: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

vanschelven 11mo ago

Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me

ashu1461 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
I think parodying the typical LLM style and mannerisms may have become a device (or even a genre) on its own.
DocIsInDaHouse 11mo 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 ;)
- wizzwizz4 11mo ago
  This is a lot easier to read than the blog post.

wavemode 11mo ago

A similar observation commonly comes up related to software development - "it's not tech debt, it's org debt" (or to put a different way, "trying to use a technical solution to solve a social problem").

__MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
I hear that one a lot but pretty frequently it's applied to "social problems" which were caused by technology. It seems to imply some kind of technology/society boundary which doesn't actually exist.
- DocTomoe 11mo ago
  Mild disagree. The saying "you can't solve social problems with technology" usually means - at least in the places I have heard / used it - "If your workforce fights a process - be it for the process being stupid, tools being slow, incentives do not align with policy, whatever - especially a control step, no amount of mandatory tech enforcement of that process step will yield better results." At best you get garbled data because someone hit the keyboard to fill in mandatory fields, sometimes, the process now works OUTSIDE of the system by informal methods because 'work still needs to be done', at worst, you get a mutiny. You have to fix the people(s' problems) by actually talking to them and take the pain points away, you do not go to 'computer says no' territory first. In my experience, no org problem is only social, and no tech problem is merely technical. Finding a sustainable solution in both fields is what distinguishes a staff engineer from a junior consultant.
  - ozim 11mo ago
    Another point of view on that. I work on SaaS platform as engineer. We can have some people from customer A asking for bunch of fields to be mandatory - just to get 6 months later people from that company nagging about the fields saying our platform sucks - well no their process and requirements suck - we didn’t come up which fields are mandatory.
  - criemen 11mo ago

Aperocky 11mo ago

It can both be Business Process Optimization and an AI strategy. In fact, if an AI strategy becomes business process optimization, I'd say that AI strategy for that company is successful. There are too many AI strategy today that isn't even business process optimization and detached from bottom line, and just being pure FOMO from the C suite. Those probably won't end well.

ToucanLoucan 11mo ago

Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved. The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving themselves all the money that would've gone to whatever is now dead. Repeat this process for 30 years and you have companies like Microsoft that can barely ship anything that works anymore, and our 4 Big Websites frequently just fail to load pages for no explicable reason, Amazon goes down and takes 1/3 of the internet with it, and AI companies are now going to devour the carcass of our internet and shit it back to us in LLM waffle while charging us money for the privilege to eat it.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 11mo ago
Honestly, I don't know if throwing people at a problem is the way to go. Doubly so given that a good chunk of the projects lately for me deal with third party vendors and those are so .. embedded that even getting basic requirements, documentation is an uphill battle ( which -- to me -- seems insane ). I have zero pull so I do what I can, notate the insanity for cya and move on. I do agree on execs congratulating themselves afterwards though. It was obscene last year. This year it was mildly muted.
- balamatom 11mo ago
  You can always throw other things at those people instead.
- jjk166 11mo ago
  Throwing people at a problem is very different from allocating an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people. A small but skilled team can accomplish a lot, whereas a lot of the wrong people can't do much at all. Generally there are more than enough warm bodies available, big companies are full of those, the issue is that skilled people aren't fungible - the team of 12 working on this project seems to be moving at a snails pace because really it's two people, both of whom are split across several other projects simultaneously, doing the real work and everyone else doing stuff that is likely unnecessary if not straight up counterproductive. It takes skill, effort and discipline to cultivate a team that actually has all the skills it needs to succeed, in the form of people who mutually work well together, to keep these people around over an extended period of time, and not try to split them up onto different projects and plug the gaps with the wrong people.

TimPC 11mo ago

I feel like this is an inside view from the BPO community and the only part of AI they see is the part that affects BPO. But for most businesses AI strategy is not about AI for internal use but AI to either improve customer funnels or launch new products. Most of the companies I've talked to in the past year wanted a strategy for customer facing AI not internal AI.

wizzwizz4 11mo ago
LLMs do not improve customer funnels. Well-designed decision-trees can, but we're not calling those "AI" at the moment.
bathtub365 11mo ago
The last time a company put an AI chat bot between me and actual customer service it didn’t listen to my problem and hallucinated something I didn’t say.

bluecheese452 11mo ago

There is an ai strategy if you are selling hype instead of products.

wombatpm 11mo ago

I worked for a fortune 300 company that engaged in a Business Process Redesign initiative. After spending 90 million on the project they pulled the plug. My takeaway was that the project was doomed because it was named wrong. Should have been called Business Process Design. They are now owned by Private Equity. I can only wonder what madness the would have wrought with AI. They tried to implement a system whereby a customer has a single customer number. Between mergers, acquisitions and shutdowns it was impossible to keep straight and keep tracking history. It impacted rates, contracts, sales commissions, division revenue-everything. In they end they gave everyone a new number while still using the old ones.

xnx 11mo ago
Relevant in so many contexts: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/