Sector notes
Five questions before you buy anything
Buying an AI tool before checking whether the business can use it well does not just waste the money. It creates operational debt that the next project has to work through.
Most operators meet AI the same way: someone mentions a tool at a conference, or a competitor is reported to have automated something. The instinct is to act, and acting means buying.
Five dimensions determine whether that purchase becomes capability or debt. They are worth answering in order, because each one depends on the one above it.
The five dimensions
- Data. Does the record exist, is it current, and is it reliable enough to act on? Everything below fails if this does.
- Process. Is the process it will change actually defined, or does it live in the heads of three people who do it differently?
- Governance. Who decides what the system may do alone, and who answers for it? This is not overhead reserved for large organisations.
- Team capability. Who operates it after handover, and do they exist yet?
- Measurement. What is the baseline, captured before go-live, against which improvement will be claimed?
Data comes first because it is the dependency for the other four. A well-governed, well-staffed business still fails if the underlying record is not there or cannot be trusted.
These five map onto the site assessment stage of our own engagements, which is why the first thing that happens is engineers walking the floor rather than a proposal arriving.