04 Sep Embed AI Into Business Processes to Rescue Lost Productivity
We are spending extraordinary amounts of money on artificial intelligence.
Nvidia’s latest quarter makes that difficult to ignore.
The company reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, up 106% year over year. Its Data Center business alone generated $89 billion, up 117%.
And the investment isn’t slowing down. Nvidia is working with some of the world’s largest financial institutions on platforms intended to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
We are building the infrastructure. We are buying the chips. We are training the models.
But leaders should be asking a much simpler question:
Where is the productivity?
Don’t Add AI. Redesign the Work.
Giving everyone access to AI isn’t the same as becoming an AI-powered organization.
Most companies are adding AI to existing processes: marketing, customer service, research, product development, administration.
But adding AI to an inefficient process may simply give you a faster inefficient process.
The bigger opportunity is to redesign how the work gets done.
Take an important process in your organization and ask:
If we were designing this process today, knowing what AI can do, would we design it the same way?
Probably not.
Look at each step.
What requires human judgment, creativity, empathy, or customer understanding?
Keep those.
Then ask what AI can research, summarize, analyze, automate, or eliminate.
A ten-step process may become six. Ten days may become two.
The real productivity opportunity isn’t simply getting people to work faster.
It’s giving people more time to do the work that matters.
Turn Productivity Into Culture
This is where AI becomes particularly interesting for leaders trying to build Cult Brands.
For more than 25 years, I have studied what separates Cult Brands from ordinary brands. One of the simplest ways I think about it is:
Culture + Customer Love = Cult Brand.
AI can strengthen both sides of that equation.
Start inside the organization.
Every company has work that consumes people’s time without creating much value: repetitive reports, unnecessary meetings, searching for information, moving data between systems, and administrative tasks that exist because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Use AI to remove that friction.
But don’t take every hour AI saves and immediately fill it with another hour of work.
Give some of that time back to your people.
Time to think. Time to collaborate. Time to experiment. Time to talk to customers. Time to create work they’re proud of.
Productivity can become a cultural advantage.
Turn Productivity Into Customer Love
AI also gives us something business leaders have wanted for decades: the ability to listen to customers at scale.
Reviews, customer service conversations, surveys, emails, social comments, community discussions, and purchasing behavior contain enormous amounts of insight.
AI can help us find the patterns.
What do our best customers love?
What frustrates them?
What are they trying to accomplish?
What do they wish we would create next?
What are they saying about us when we’re not in the room?
Feed those answers back into product development, customer experience, marketing, innovation, and culture.
Now AI isn’t simply making your organization faster.
It’s helping your organization understand people better.
The opportunity becomes:
AI → Productivity → Stronger Culture → Deeper Customer Understanding → Better Experiences → Customer Love → Growth
Don’t Automate Away What Makes You Special
Nvidia can build the infrastructure. Investors can finance the data centers. Technology companies can build increasingly powerful models.
But businesses still have to turn all that intelligence into value.
And for Cult Brands, value ultimately comes from human beings understanding other human beings unusually well.
AI should remove the work that gets in the way of judgment, curiosity, empathy, creativity, relationships, and customer understanding.
So instead of asking your team:
“How can we use more AI?”
Ask:
“Where are we losing productivity, and how can AI redesign that process so our people have more time to create value for our customers?”
That is how AI becomes more than another technology investment.
It becomes a way to build a stronger culture, create deeper customer love, and ultimately build a Cult Brand.