Big thank you to the Southwest Business Summit for having me yesterday.
Genuinely honoured to get invited into rooms like these.
And I want to repeat what I said on stage, for the people who were there and the people who weren’t:
AI scales whatever system you already have. If the system is broken, you’re going to get faster “broken”.
That’s worth sitting with if you’re thinking about AI as a productivity layer you bolt on top of existing operations.
Across 37 enterprise AI studies from the last 18 months, 60% of organizations report zero P&L impact from their AI spend. Not because the tools don’t work. Because they deployed tools into workflows they’d never mapped, solving problems they’d never defined.
The companies actually winning with AI, those seeing real margin and cycle-time gains, did one thing differently.
They sequenced it right.
Outcome first. Workflow second. AI third.
They named the business result they were chasing. Then mapped the workflow step by step. Then asked where AI changes the economics.
Not where it trims minutes off a task. Where it structurally shifts what a role costs or what a process produces.
That’s a leadership call. It doesn’t happen at the team level. It doesn’t get delegated to IT. The owner or CEO has to be the one who names the constraint. The single thing in the business that, if removed, would most change profitability. Then work backwards through the workflow to find where AI fits.
Most leaders are skipping straight to the tool and wondering why nothing changed on the income statement.
The gap between the organizations doing this at depth and the ones still running pilots is compounding by the quarter.
The window to be in the first group is still open. But not indefinitely.
