• At a 3% margin, a cost reduction under 1% raises profit by more than 25%. The same efficiency gain at a 30%-margin software company barely moves the business, which is why thin margins are where AI arithmetic gets violent.
• Commoditized businesses are price takers — the market sets the price, not the company — so cost is the only lever they actually control. That is what makes an internal cost attack strategic rather than housekeeping.
• Most enterprise AI assumes employees will adopt a new tool and use it correctly. That assumption breaks hardest in trucking, manufacturing and field service, so the value has to arrive without asking the workforce to change how it works.

If your business runs on thin margins — distribution, field service, logistics — this piece reframes AI adoption as a structural cost attack rather than a productivity perk, and quantifies why moving first matters before efficiency gains get competed away. The coordination-cost lens gives operators a concrete framework for where to actually deploy AI.

• postAI Makes It Easier to Build the Wrong ProductGrey
• postAI-pilling our companyNeil Rahilly
• postWhy Bottom-Up AI Pilots Stall and Workflow Redesign Doesn'tAndrew Ng

Checking sign-in…

Loading comments…