Processes are the AI prompts of organizations – How to make yours "AI-ready" – or "AI-able"

I stumbled upon a quote: "a shitty process doesn't become better being digitalized. It becomes a shitty digital process". The same applies for AI

So my proposal of your journey is:

1. Challenge
2. Reduction
3. Simplification
4. Acceleration
5. Automation
6. and only then: AI

After working in industries from purely digital companies to quite offline focused organizations in the field of the now called digital transformation, one thing became clearer and clearer. It's never about the tool. It's about how people use it.

Everyone jumps on AI. You see more and more AI experts every week. To be honest, I am not. I have a rough understanding of people, processes and technology. But this is what I miss in exactly this discussion. How to prepare a company with all it's parts to be ready for the ages of AI.

"So why should we not just apply AI to our existing organization?" Let me explain with a simple analogy: Generative AI is currently best used in highly scalable environments with a high grade of automation. But you would intuitivley not automate most of the processes in your company. Why? Because its too complex and every time different?

So it appears like:

Before AI, get automation working. But what to do to get there?

A few months ago, I found an interesting structure how a well known founder reworked his own structure in his companies, after he failed automating too early.

My post is an attempt to apply this methodology to create a kind of AI-able path.

1 Challenge

"Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb." ― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

Let me put that right: In my experience, most companies will fail here. I have met too many managers not willing to be challenged. Putting their ego in front of the success of the company. Companies are embracing features because the person really knowing the right path is either not here or not heard.

As we all know, culture eats strategy for breakfast, and a culture not embracing critical thinking is either a religion or just last millenium – or both.

2 Reduction

"Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough." ― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

Reduction is about taking responsibility. If your culture sucks, surely no one will. When GDPR rolled out, I was called to an ecommerce shop firing 80 tracking pixels. No one knew who had requested it, some were even firing to servers not being existing anymore. But no one wanted to take the resposibility to delete them. After I commented them out, only 4 of them were found to be really needed.

So if you want to reduce, you have to allow the mistakes.

3 Simplification

"Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. The common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist." ― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

This was for a long time my go-to rule for scaling teams. Can you explain it in a way, so that a more junior person can take over the task? The same effect rules in onboarding. If you have to onboard a lot of people, you want them to be productive as fast as possible. But this is the point where you should notice that this is about written processes. A lot of Digital Marketing teams pretend their domain being so fresh that everything changes so fast. Come on. You know it better. And btw I am not talking about documenting everything, but for the value adding processes you should. And for the rest, back to Step 1. A good rule of thumb is to closely look at bottlenecks. But again, start at 1.

4 Acceleration

"Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. " ― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

This requires a documented process and a documented way to accelerate it. But if the discussion of the accelerate costs more then the value of the accelerate, skip it.

5 Automation

"Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out." ― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

Automations are the best way to create reproducable quality. So if you look from a perspective of expected and predictable outcome, you would like to get to this part, so that you can be sure that variations in your AI outcomes are not due to erors in the earlier stages.

6 and only then: AI

This would be the stage where I would recommend to implement technologies like AI. And this describes an organization that is ready for what comes after AI.

Garbage in – garbage out was never so impressive and scalable as today. Are you a part of it? Or am I? Am I just accelerating the bullshit being said about AI? I don't know. I found these thoughts helpful and decided to share them to a broader audience.

Coming back to People, Process, Technology: The one Element that can drive this transformation are the people, the leaders.

So if you consider being one of these, I hope that my thoughts were helpful for your own. And if not, you know what to do:

Challenge.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. ― © 1997 Apple Computer, Inc.