Companies are rushing into AI with great expectations. Some executives see a productivity revolution. Others see a convenient justification for abruptly reducing headcount. That is the wrong starting point.
Companies should not deploy AI primarily to explain layoffs. They should use it to remove the unnecessary and inherent complexity that has accumulated across products, processes, systems, meetings, reports and decision rights.
If AI simply automates a broken operating model, the company will become faster at doing the wrong things.
Manufacturers have spent decades adding reports, approvals, dashboards, technologies, committees and exceptions. People are buried under reports, meetings, emails, slacks, dashboards. Together, they created an expensive organizational fog. They slow down the organizational bandwidth. People now spend enormous energy navigating the company instead of serving customers, solving problems and improving operations. The first job of AI should be to expose that complexity, challenge it and help eliminate it. That means freeing people from low value tasks to high value outcomes.
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