Yet another blogger conflating AI with LLMs again. AI will absolutely transform your business process if you're not yet another software shop vibing container deployment scenarios. ex: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/10/researchers-inven...
It's Always the Process, Stupid
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Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#12> 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. Executive…
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.
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#13Yet another blogger conflating AI with LLMs again. AI will absolutely transform your business process if you're not yet another software shop vibing container deployment scenarios. ex: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/10/researchers-inven...
How is what you linked a business process? Cancer identification is a step in a larger process, specifically the "analyze unstructured data" part that the author alludes to.
AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails.
"Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?"
- Russ Ackoff
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#14Yet another blogger conflating AI with LLMs again. AI will absolutely transform your business process if you're not yet another software shop vibing container deployment scenarios. ex: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/10/researchers-inven...
How is what you linked a business process? Cancer identification is a step in a larger process, specifically the "analyze unstructured data" part that the author alludes to. AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails. "Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if…
Hi Russ,
Did you read the example? The business process of human bias is gone in the cancer detective phase. AI eliminated it.
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#15This should go to all CEOs. They should realize that the real problem AI solves is handling of text and unstructured data. That is the core ability. But I don't blame them. Process optimization is hard. If a new tool promises more speed, without changing the process, they are ready to pour money at that.
Text and unstructured data is mainly related to NLP/LLM, not to the AI as a whole.
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#16I've seen several serveral introduction of new ERPs in companies, usually they wanted the same processes they had just with the new software, the customizing turned out be a nightmare as the consultants usually accpeted their wishes and the programmers had to bend the ERP-system accordingly, never was in budget or in time
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is what you linked a business process? Cancer identification is a step in a larger process, specifically the "analyze unstructured data" part that the author alludes to. AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails. "Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if…
Hi Russ, Did you read the example? The business process of human bias is gone in the cancer detective phase. AI eliminated it.
Cancer detection is not a process. That's a discrete step in a process.
My name isn't Russ. Russ Ackoff was a business process optimization leader from the last century -- a contemporary of Deming and the Toyota school etc.
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#18>It is the first technology that is truly useful for handling unstructured data. >Processes that rely on unstructured data are usually unstructured processes. I appreciate someone succinctly summing up this idea.
This doesn’t ring true to me. Having processes which rely on communication between humans using natural language can of course be either structured or unstructured. Plenty of highly functioning companies existed well before structured data was even a thing.
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#19> 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. Executive…
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.
Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid
#20> 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. Executive…
Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me
Probably the OP might have used LLM's to structure the document, but the sentiment `Automating stupidity = faster stupidity` is a great take away.