As Technology Gets Easier to Deploy, the Advantage Becomes Human

“We don’t necessarily talk about AI in isolation. In fact, we never talk about AI in isolation,” says Andy Haley, chief executive of Sullivan & Stanley, the change and transformation consultancy, and a managing director at Accenture for close to two decades before that. He calls himself “a recovering enterprise architect”: a career spent watching organisations reach for a technology before anyone had agreed what it was for.

Technology alone only delivers its full promise in a greenfield

New technology can do everything the pitch promises, but the conditions are strict. It works “in green fields, where there’s no legacy technology, no legacy mindset, no legacy process, no legacy operating model.” An awful lot of firms don’t get that. They carry “seven or eight different operating models all trying to work together,” the residue of past transformations. So the useful question isn’t what AI can do. It’s the one Andy keeps turning back on people: “If the answer is AI, what’s the question?”

His test asks three questions, none of them about technology: Is the value there? Do you know what you would have to influence to capture it? Can you actually influence it? “If you can’t say yes to those three things you probably shouldn’t start,” he says, “and somebody has to be accountable for making sure those three things are true.”

Mid-market problems surface in execution, and may have started in the business case

Ask where the gap opens up in a mid-market firm and the answer is late in the process. Decisions come easily when everyone is in one building, so the design phase moves fast and feels like progress. “Then it hits the road, and you need teams to actually execute stuff. That’s typically when you find out it’s not working.”

Andy’s point isn’t that mid-market teams execute badly. He thinks their relative simplicity can make execution easier: “It’s far more likely that mid-market firms don’t capture the value because it was never there in the first place, rather than they couldn’t execute it because it’s much more simple to execute.” He is “not saying this is gospel,” but he is direct about where the pressure comes from: “a lot of mid-market organizations will write business cases as sales pitches for funding, because funding your mid-markets is far less available than it is in some of the big corporates.”

The missing enterprise steward

Someone has to see the whole picture: how a business decision lands on the technology estate, how both land on the operating model. Andy says that role “very rarely exists,” and is careful about what kind of role it is not. “I don’t think it’s a role that owns it,” he says, “it’s a role that coordinates the others and speaks their language to disarm them and get them all working together.” Accountability stays where it sits.

Plenty of organisations have a chief architect, but the remit stops at technology, and “it never encompasses the business or the org chart or the org design. That’s normally an HR thing.” So organisations are left hoping they understand what a change will touch: “the assumption is that the CIO will work with the COO, will work with the people officer and it will magically all happen.”

Banking the first AI win can stop the second one

Sullivan & Stanley’s own research found 42% of organisations stuck in AI pilots that never scale, while 15.5% had scaled AI. The first wins are the easy ones. “Let’s put Copilot in to make it easier for us to proofread emails and summarize things.”

A time saving, a clean business case, and then the decision that shapes everything after it. “Too often that saving gets banked, rather than saying, okay, well how do I reinvest in the architecture foundations that will unlock the next order of business case?” Bank it, and the data engineering and governance behind a more ambitious use case must justify themselves without the earlier saving.

Mid-market leaders can usually put a number on hours saved. In aibl’s conversations, far fewer can show that the operation itself improved.

Andy compares that shift to the move from film to digital photography. “It’s like when you had to pay money for your camera film, you were very cautious about what you took pictures of and you were careful when you pressed the button, because having that camera film was a finite resource. Now, digital cameras, you just press away, you take thousands of photos. What matters is what’s the quality of photo you want?”

Building digital things, as he puts it, is “now pretty much free.” Once production stops being scarce, the test becomes the quality of what is produced and how well it serves the intended outcome.

The outcome has to matter to people

When building is easy, Andy locates the advantage in the people deciding what is worth building. “How committed are your people to what you’re trying to build and how much discretionary effort you get? How good is their judgment? That’s really where the sustained competitive advantage come from.”

Commitment depends on whether people understand who an outcome is for and “why it’s important to them to the point where they can build an emotional attachment to what it is they’re trying to achieve as a group.”

An organisation can also wear that commitment down. Clients would pull him aside and show him a folder: “strategy 2016, strategy 2018, strategy 2020, strategy 2022,” each one done by a different third party. “We never implement.”

For Andy, AI can’t do that human work for them. “It’s a tool to help you on the way, but investing in the emotional security and safety of those people… is really the magic of sustained differentiated value going forwards.” Mid-market firms, he thinks, have less complex technology estates than large corporates, leaving them more scope to differentiate through their people.

The question he would put to a CEO before signing off an AI programme reaches beyond planning: it tests whether people understand the outcome well enough to care about making it work. “What’s the outcome that we care about? Are we all aligned on the outcome we care about? It’s as simple as that.”