Transformation is NOT What You Need
It’s easy to be skeptical of AI in your business. You see headlines like “95% of corporate AI projects produce nothing measurable” and “42% of AI pilots get abandoned”. But if you think AI is “overhyped” or “too complex for now”, you’re wrong. AI works. The transformation project is where progress stalls.
The problem with transformation projects is that you assume you need to change everything about your business to integrate AI. How you store and use data, how teams collaborate, what tools you use, your IT security practices, etc.
If AI transformation has to change everything, it feels easier to delay it for now…
What if you didn’t need to transform anything?
Since 2015, we have run managed customer operations (teams and technology) for more than 100 ecommerce stores. A big part of our value is finding problems worth fixing in the client’s business - hidden in customer support tickets.
If we had pursued the typical AI transformation initiatives most companies are pitched, it would have meant changing a decade of how we do business. How we analyze tickets, surface opportunities for the client, prioritize which are important, all the infrastructure involved on our end and the client’s side - everything. Intimidating, complex, and easy to never fully achieve.
Because we were early to AI (we saw the disruption it would bring to our industry), we learned to take a different approach. Rather than figuring out how to integrate AI into all of our systems, we layered AI across all of the tools in our business.
- No new IT platform
- No data migrations
- No retraining of the team
- No AI transformation
AI is like a teammate you onboard
Most companies assume they need IT transformation to get results with AI because the technology is so profound. If AI is able to reason and analyze and execute work like a human, doesn’t this mean we need to change the entire way companies operate?
The answer is the opposite. Because AI functions similarly to a team of humans, you can integrate it in a similar way to onboarding team members:
- Give it context about your business, your strategies, the tools you use, etc.
- Give it scoped access to the systems so it can get specific data when needed
- Collaborate with it just like a human teammate - chatting, assigning tasks, etc.
Just like you wouldn’t re-architect the entire company around hiring a few humans, you don’t need to transform your entire tech stack to add AI. It’s so similar to how humans work that you can integrate it in the same way.
What this AI approach unlocks
By integrating AI in this way, we were able to work at a level of scale and depth that no human customer service analysis team could match. Typically, a customer service team analyzes 1 to 2% of tickets, days or weeks after they’ve occurred - that’s the scale that a human-only approach allows. You see frustrated customers in specific tickets, but not larger trends of problems in the business.
For us, we got to 100% of tickets analyzed in near real time. That coverage changes what’s possible. We can see things the client would never have noticed before. For example, for one client, we found that a specific cohort of products in one region of the country had major returns issues. Our AI approach was able to trace it to a single supplier in the client’s system, something that would not have been possible with the typical analysis approach.
In your business, if you give AI context about everything going on and access to the same systems humans use, it can produce the results of huge teams. This doesn’t have to replace humans. It ends up massively increasing the scale of results your human team can produce.
Are you weary of transformation?
So many companies are selling AI transformation projects, but the simpler approach is the path to results:
- Delete the word “AI transformation” from your mindset
- If you’re feeling anxious in the middle of a huge project, pay attention to your gut
- Don’t start changing all of your tools to integrate AI. Just give AI access.
If you want to think through how this looks for your business, bring it to the free AI Strategy Brainstorm. It’s an open discussion with a CEO who runs on this every day — and even if we never work together, you’ll leave with the AI aha moment you’ve been missing.