Nieuws
0 reacties
3x viewed
Column by Jan Scheele
What has struck me in recent months is not that entrepreneurs are still in doubt about whether to do anything with AI. We have passed that phase. Day in, day out, in conversations with managers and entrepreneurs I notice just the opposite: the urgency has increased, as has the enthusiasm. Almost everyone is working on it, from separate experiments in marketing and sales to broader conversations about productivity, customer contact and strategy. This is precisely why it is so striking that most organisations still see so little of it.
The research by former TEDx colleague Bart Verlegh makes this painfully concrete. Only 8 per cent of organisations in Limburg are already seeing significant impact today. The remaining 92 per cent do not yet see any, or at least no measurable, positive impact. That picture is less exceptional than it seems. I see exactly the same pattern in many international analyses: a large proportion of initiatives remain stuck in what has now become a familiar term, 'pilot purgatory'. There is plenty of testing, demonstration and experimentation, but the step towards real anchoring in processes and decision-making is lacking.
That is exactly where I think things go wrong. What I often see in practice is that while companies work smarter at task level, they hardly work differently at organisational level. An employee writes a proposal faster, a marketer creates content faster, a consultant summarises a conversation faster. That feels like progress, but it is not yet business impact. In my view, the real question is much more uncomfortable: is it demonstrably improving the organisation... or are we mainly performing the same work a little faster?
Research shows why that so often backfires. Between 70 per cent and 85 per cent of projects do not make it to the production phase, often due to poor data, fragmented systems, unclear ownership and a lack of process redesign. I really recognise this strongly. The technology itself is usually not the bottleneck; the problem is more often in the organisation around it. AI accelerates what is already there. If processes are syrupy, they get syrupy faster. If data is messy, output becomes unreliable faster. If no one is really responsible for the business outcome, it will remain just interesting demos.
This is also where the leadership question lies for me. Many entrepreneurs still look at tools, while the real task lies elsewhere. Which process in your company needs to be fundamentally different? Where is there friction, repetition or unnecessary overhead? What choices would you dare to make if one employee could do more work structurally? As long as these questions are not on the table, AI will, in my view, remain mainly a promise.
Maybe that is the most important conclusion at the moment. Not too little is happening... on the contrary, a lot is happening! Just too often still without direction, without redesign and without a hard measuring stick. The companies that will soon really make a difference will not be the ones that experiment the most, but those that dare to change first.
Source: Enterprise in Limburg