alt Hacker News> Let’s rip the Band-Aid off immediately: If your underlying business process is a mess, sprinkling "AI dust" on it won’t turn it into gold. It will just speed up the rate at which you generate garbage.
In the world of Business IT, we get seduced by the shiny new toy. Right now, that toy is Artificial Intelligence. Boardrooms are buzzing with buzzwords like LLMs, agentic workflows, and generative reasoning. Executives are frantically asking, "What is our AI strategy?"
But here is the hard truth:
There is no such thing as an AI strategy. There is only Business Process Optimization (BPO).
This is well-expressed, and almost certainly true for an overwhelming majority of companies.
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Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me
There is an ai strategy if you are selling hype instead of products.
Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved.
The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving themselves all the money that would've gone to whatever is now dead.
Repeat this process for 30 years and you have companies like Microsoft that can barely ship anything that works anymore, and our 4 Big Websites frequently just fail to load pages for no explicable reason, Amazon goes down and takes 1/3 of the internet with it, and AI companies are now going to devour the carcass of our internet and shit it back to us in LLM waffle while charging us money for the privilege to eat it.
It can both be Business Process Optimization and an AI strategy.
In fact, if an AI strategy becomes business process optimization, I'd say that AI strategy for that company is successful.
There are too many AI strategy today that isn't even business process optimization and detached from bottom line, and just being pure FOMO from the C suite. Those probably won't end well.
I feel like this is an inside view from the BPO community and the only part of AI they see is the part that affects BPO. But for most businesses AI strategy is not about AI for internal use but AI to either improve customer funnels or launch new products. Most of the companies I've talked to in the past year wanted a strategy for customer facing AI not internal AI.
A similar observation commonly comes up related to software development - "it's not tech debt, it's org debt" (or to put a different way, "trying to use a technical solution to solve a social problem").