AI, tools and transformation
The typical big American company today has hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of different pieces of software. It has giant ‘big iron’ horizontal systems of record like SAP and Workday, it has hundreds of vertical SaaS applications, and then there are hundreds more workflows, scripts, automations and databases, right down to the 10 meg spreadsheet running a department. Very often, the company doesn’t even know quite how much it has, what’s actually being used, and what it’s paying for. And yet, with all this software, the company is full of boring, repetitive tasks.
It can be very tempting to think that AI will sweep most of this away. There’s an old joke that an engineer is someone who’ll spend an hour building a tool to automate a task that would take 10 minutes. But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code. You can just ask the model to make the tool for you, or, more fundamentally, just do the task for you itself. Instead of having to create those tools one at a time, software might be dynamic, generative, free-form, and spontaneous. Massively more tasks can be automated, with massively less software.
If you’re a tool-builder, and everybody in Silicon Valley is a tool-builder, this is intoxicating. But I think it misunderstands where software comes from and how people use it, and I think it misses how companies change.
First of all, most people are not tool builders, and most people don’t instinctively think about how their job could be done in a different way. If you spend all your time in the Silicon Valley bubble, it can be easy to forget this, because your entire world is about creating tools that change how things are done. But if you’re a really great matrimonial lawyer, you spend all your day thinking about your cases and your clients, not about what great legal discovery software would do; if you’re a really great enterprise salesperson, you spend all your time thinking about your product and your clients and your competitors, not about how great sales enablement software could make you more productive.
Products like Excel try to bridge this problem with on-boarding flows, assistants, and templates - everything you see in ‘File/New’ is a suggestion for what you could do with this. But every one of those templates still became a company, and that’s what I see in things like Claude for X as well - this is helpful, but not the answer.
Narrowly, that means that the task to be automated might be sitting in plain sight but the people with that task don’t see it. This is what leads to the idea of the ‘forward-deployed engineer’ - someone who is a builder, and knows what AI can build, can ‘just’ walk around a law firm or an architecture office and see the opportunities lying on the table that the lawyer or the architect doesn't see. (This is also the experience of a lot of people in tech when they were 15, wandering around an internship or their parents’s office - “um, daddy, did you realise you could just do it like this?”).
The deeper problem is most of what we’ve automated in the last few decades wasn’t obvious, even if you are a tool-builder, and didn’t have an obvious solution either. We can all think of examples of stuff we use every day where our first reaction was “Why would I want that?” Very often, it's not obvious that the problem exists, and very often it's embedded or bundled or hidden inside something else. Equally, even if you can see the problem, or think you can, the right way to fix it often isn’t clear either, and the way to fix it is to redefine it or unbundle it, and working that out is hard. For many successful software companies, there were half a dozen failed attempts that came before and didn't find quite the right approach or the right problem.
None of this is solved by making easier to write code - by making it easier to make tools. The hard part is knowing that you need a tool for this in the first place, and then knowing what the tool should do.
But even once you reach that point, you have to get everybody else to use it, too. Many of the problems, workflows and tasks that we might want to automate touch 50 or 500 people across five different departments, three different systems of record, and four different regulatory regimes. You might have a great idea for doing an accounts payable differently, but you yourself can't change how everybody in the company does it. That has to be a purchase, and a decision, and an 18-month sales process.
Second, all of this means that software is bought or chosen or created on a spectrum from top-down to bottom-up - the company buys SAP and the user makes a spreadsheet - and I think it’s useful to think of this also as a spectrum from institutionalised to improvised.
You have tasks that are easy to do in the dedicated tools you already have, whether it’s SAP, Carta or Rippling. These tasks and workflows have been institutionalized - a bunch of people in those companies and your company have spent a lot of time working out the correct way to do that task, and it’s important that everyone do it the same way with the same tools. But then you have edge cases, exceptions and one-off questions, that are hard or impossible to do in those tools. Your users, bottom-up and creating their own solutions, manage these in a fuzzy, improvised space of freeform substrates like Excel, email, shared folders, Tableau, Powerpoint and CSVs, screenshots, PDFs and conference calls.
But once this task becomes something that you're doing all the time, in the same way every time, and that lots of people are doing, and becomes important and has revenue and risk attached to it, then, at a certain point, the company has to institutionalize it. You need audit, security, maintenance and accountability. You pave the desire path and pay someone to set it in stone. As above, you might not realize that the path is there - you might not realise that you have hundreds of people wasting an hour a day doing this - and it might be hard to work out the right way to fix that, but that process is why the company has hundreds of apps.
We went though a lot of this with the shift to SaaS, which was another order-of-magnitude change in how much software we had, along with a new operating model and a new cycle time, and that killed a lot of incumbents that couldn’t make the jump (the real rationale for the ‘SaaSpocalypse’). It’s a continuous and organic flow of bundling and unbundling. All of those SaaS apps do something that you could do in SAP or Excel or email - Carta is a $4bn company that manages one spreadsheet for your CFO - and sometimes tasks move back. A few years ago I spoke to a consultant who said that half of their jobs were telling people who used Excel to use a database and the other half were the other way around.
Hence, if you’re PwC and you hire 3-4,000 graduates every year, you use dedicated, ‘institutionalised’ software to manage that. If you’re a small firm and you hire five or ten, you use email, a shared folder and Google Sheets. As that small firm grows, at a certain point it will outgrow that, and maybe move to Notion, or to an SME-focused SaaS HCM. But a small team inside PwC might also be using Google Sheets to track candidates to fill a role because Workday is too inflexible - the unbundling begins again.
Now AI rolls across all that. AI will expand all of the existing apps, and there’ll be many new vertical apps, and Excel, and Tableau, Google Sheets, email and all the other freeform spaces for improvising solutions will gain new capabilities. With that cycle, the chatbot itself is a new freeform space that sits next to Excel and email, taking over tasks from them and from your apps, and also losing tasks to those apps.
Now that small company hiring ten graduates might stick in Google sheets a lot longer because AI makes it more scalable, or you might use it as a data store for Gemini, and you might ask “should we get Claude to make something or move this to Notion?”… and then you see there’s a new SaaS app aimed right at you that solves this plus some other problem you hasn’t thought of. AI doesn’t change the question: it creates new choices and moves the thresholds.
I think you can see all of this in the experience of enterprise AI deployment in the last three years. Every big company gave everyone Copilot (or maybe ChatGPT or Claude) and a small number of people are using this a lot (some of whom actually increased their productivity), while a larger set of people are using it a couple of times a week and a lot of the rest of your company isn't really using it at all. This is partly a change management and a training problem, but it's mostly the same problem that you would have had if you'd given everyone in the company a PC and Lotus 123 in 1983, or an internet connection and a web browser in 1997. How exactly does this map to everybody's tasks and the problems they actually have this week? Yes, you did give everybody a PC and Lotus, but that wasn’t how you transformed the efficiency of your invoice processing. Yes, you gave everybody a web browser, but that wasn't how you rebuilt your supply chain management around the internet, and it certainly wasn't how a retailer managed e-commerce.
Narrowly, the way that companies think about changing those kinds of structural processes is to start doing pilots. You run trials of products (both bought and built internal) that use the new capabilities of AI to automate processes that you couldn't automate before. There’s now all sorts of data around how many of these pilots there are, how many work (roughly half, as is normal - this is why they’re pilots!) and what can go wrong.
But again, this is a very old-fashioned CIO conversation around use cases, lighthouses, pilots, heroes, quick wins and measurable results. Meanwhile, the CEO and the board scratch their heads and say “Wait, but we've got 100s of workflows and we've done five or 10 pilots. That doesn’t seem to scale?” Giving everyone in the company ChatGPT does scale theoretically, except that most people aren't really finding ways to use it.
Going back to a hypothetical bank giving everyone spreadsheets in the 1980s, or a retailer giving everyone a web browser in the 1990s, yes, of course you should do that, and yes, of course, you need to think about training and change management and all the other good stuff that KPMG can tell you about. But that isn’t how you think about transforming the way your company works around a generational new technology.
Stepping back, it seems to me that with each new transformative technology, every company has to ask three kinds of questions. First, how do we buy, build and deploy this? Do we do pilots? Should we take the product that's bundled from Microsoft/Google/Oracle, build something ourselves, pay someone to build something, or buy this new thing from a startup? Second, they have to ask how far this changes their operations. What does it mean? What does email mean for us? What does spreadsheets mean for us? The answer to that might be radically different if you were an insurance company or a law firm. And third, you have to ask whether this creates new challenges to your business’s economics, new competitive pressures, or, perhaps, some kind of existential threat.
You don’t answer those questions by giving everyone Claude for X. Indeed, all of this means lots of new pitches for professional services (which is ironical given how many questions AI poses to their own business models). Do you want to work out how to deploy an LLM-enabled voice analytics tool in your call center? You're probably going to call Accenture. The vendors themselves have always been happy to help, and now the big labs have their own ‘deploycos’ - we used to joke that a ‘machine learning scientist’ is a statistician who lives in San Francisco, so maybe a ‘forward deployed engineer’ is anyone that OpenAI hired from a systems integrator. On the other side, your startup is building a great new tool and you want to go to market quickly? You'll probably call the Big Four. You're frustrated with how hard it is to sell AI software into law firms or accountancy firms. Okay - go start an ‘AI-enabled’ law firm and work out if that can be a key point of leverage (or whether it's like starting a ‘PC-enabled law firm’ in the 1980s). And of course, if you’re the board, and you're trying to work out whether this is some kind of existential threat or a massive revenue opportunity, then you’ll think about calling Bain, BCG and McKinsey (or your friendly neighborhood M&A banker) - this is what they do.
Stepping back from all of this, though, there's also a much simpler way to think about the question. With every new technology, we start by using it for the work we already have, and we just do that more and faster. But then, over time, you make entirely new things. We will use AI to automate broad classes of stuff inside existing workflows and existing companies (although, as I’ve outlined above, that will be enormously more trouble and work than just giving everybody a model). But with every previous platform shift, the stuff that actually mattered was the stuff that wasn't even possible before and that no-one even imagined.
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