I’m going to make a bit of a prediction here.
Companies that are AI-native entering traditional industries will be so much more efficient than the incumbents. And one of the key reasons is simple: they never have to migrate.
Migration is the painful part
In my past life as a consultant, I saw what migration really involves. Making people redundant. Retraining others. Adopting new tools. And most importantly, doing all of it at scale.
Change is hard. Changing many people is even harder. And changing while growing and moving forward at the same time is mind-boggling and largely frustrating.
It’s how a lot of the Big Four and the ERP software companies like Oracle and SAP boomed in the past. Incumbents hiring the likes of Accenture, KPMG, and Deloitte to run massive, multi-year IT transformations. Even though AI can facilitate a lot of that work in the future, the weakest link is still people.
I am the bottleneck
I feel this personally. Even now, I am the bottleneck for how much AI can actually move in my organization. And my organization is only four people.
Of the four of us, I’m the only one actively building AI tools. Now imagine multiple people building AI tools, having to integrate them with each other’s workflows, when each person’s tools are tailored to their own specific way of working.
Or is the answer that organizations need a dedicated team building an internal super app? One that integrates every single function, takes away all the other enterprise software, and layers their own AI on top of everything. Except we’re not talking about hundreds of rows and tables. We’re talking about millions of rows and tables of data. That’s truly mind-boggling.
Imagine a construction company decades into the field. Data printed in files, in folders everywhere. Little real investment in IT infrastructure. Most of their knowledge implicit, in people’s heads. How would you transform that organization into one that runs more efficiently on a fixed cost basis, with a leaner workforce, creating ten-x or hundred-x workers instead?
The newcomer’s advantage
This is why I’m quite excited to be in this space as a newcomer, although it’s still conjecture that we will be successful.
I think we have technology on our side. And we’re small enough to really try things without breaking the back of the organization, upsetting too many people, or jeopardizing anyone’s job.
The incumbents have the experience, the track record, and the data, even if it’s in folders. But every step forward for them means dragging the whole organization along. We get to start where they’re trying to arrive.