Why Bottom-Up AI Pilots Stall and Workflow Redesign Doesn't
- Source
- x.com
- Date
How can businesses go beyond using AI for incremental efficiency gains to create transformative impact? I write from the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, where I’ve been speaking with many CEOs about how to use AI for growth. A recurring theme is that running many experimental, bottom-up AI projects — letting a thousand flowers bloom — has failed to lead to significant payoffs. Instead, bigger gains require workflow redesign: taking a broader, perhaps top-down view of the multiple steps in a process and changing how they work together from end to end. Consider a bank issuing loans. The workflow consists of several discrete stages: Marketing -> Application -> Preliminary Approval -> Final Review -> Execution Suppose each step used to be manual. Preliminary Approval used to require an hour-long human review, but a new agentic system can do this automatically in 10 minutes. Swapping human review for AI review — but keeping everything else the same — gives a minor efficiency gain but isn’t transformative. Here’s what would be transformative: Instead of applicants waiting a week for a human to review their application, they can get a decision in 10 minutes. When…
Context
Making one step faster changes a customer's experience only if the surrounding process can use that speed. Andrew Ng illustrates this in a workflow-redesign essay with a hypothetical lender whose AI system performs preliminary loan review in ten minutes.
A faster review alone leaves delays elsewhere intact. To offer applicants a rapid decision, the lender would also need efficient digital intake and routing, with final review and execution prepared for the resulting volume. Ng's argument is that teams should connect a local technical improvement to the complete service they want to offer. The loan example explains that dependency; it is not a reported banking deployment.
- AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
Checking sign-in…
Loading comments…