I have family in Australia.
My brother works for an energy company **yee shall not be named** and he is leading an endpoint practice for end user compute and beyond.
In our conversations, here is what we see across the globe.
Cognitive dissonance, people will literally do things that make no sense for no clear reason other than to do it knowing it won’t work.
Vanity metrics, people count things but there is no real alignment of the thing counted to value added. “I banged my head against the wall 25 times today, we have successfully done it 25 times.”
Management, people try to MANAGE people instead of lead them. Stupid.
Human resources is all but gone. I said “all but” because someone has to be the axe person.
Companies don’t have any idea how much things cost vs save and/or understand value.
Board initiative for AI = 15m
Board tells CIO save 20m (Positive 5m) outcome
CIO tells board they are going to reduce applications and services from 50 to 30 which will save them 45m (good news!)
CIO executes on transformation activity. (Fire people that know things)
CIO has to hire new people (mostly contractors) cost is 30m. (Bad news)
They reduce the applications successfully to 30 from 50 but they have to pay for integration and enhancement of the 30 which equals 20m
Board needs AI which was expected to cost 15m but because AI things change so much and the tokenization is now an economy of its own, it will cost at least double. 30m
35m over budget so far BUT ..
CIO will report success (how??)
Reduction of applications will lower overall run if we look at 3 years (CIO will more than likely be gone by that time)
AI initiative successfully implemented (We doing things and stuff) No value realized but lots and lots of activity.
Overall, the company has record profit and sales. (Various reasons as to why but no one cares about the extra cost when the money is flowing,
Hey, I wonder, what will happen when the money stops flowing?
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I don’t know.
I think the stupidity will continue and if you are smart, you’ll be aggravated.
If you are smarter, you won’t care because it isn’t worth the aggravation.
What do you think?
It usually starts with the board rewarding activity because activity is easy to see. Measuring results is too hard… so nobody asks whether the broken process actually got fixed. Fixing it would mean admitting it was broken, so the company buys a shiny new tool instead. When the tool doesn’t fix it either, the company pays consultants millions to tell them what their own staff said for free last year. The board loves the consultants’ deck… which counts as activity, so the cycle starts all over again.
I think we really don’t know how to deploy AI in the right manner, and are allowing companies to persuade us to use AI the way they build it and not let the individual companies figure out how to deploy it to really do good work for them. I saw this with IBM’s Watson when they first presented it. So, it is like putting a round peg in a square hole. If we really discover how to use AI we will have to share data with others which means also the competition which many companies are not willing to do, but figure if you have all the right data, you will have the same answer from AI to the best solution but if you only feed AI your data, the best you will do is the best AI can come up with for your own company and not the best the industry has to offer. So, that means you fix problems in an instant of data and the data changes over time and the next morning you wake up and the solution you had the day before is already obsolete. This is why the human has to be central to the organization and like so many tools in the past, they eventually become just tools and instead of helping they get in the way and the cost of the change in steady state becomes even more expensive.