Internal Strategy Development Without Outside Consultants
Perry C. Douglas
July 10 2024
In a recent article from “ The Information,” there’s an article titled “Google, Amazon Quietly Tamps Down Generative AI Expectations.” It looks to be that Big Tech, after championing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) over the last couple of years, is realizing that their hype hasn’t been able to transform into real products and solutions that people need.
As with many new developments, fascination with it turns into excessive hype, creating a major gap between what is true about the offering and what is hype. In the end, the hype proves to be unsustainable and eventually fades.
So behind the scenes, those driving the hype narratives are tempering down expectations because they won’t be met anytime soon.
The big tech aristocracy has created and leveraged GenAI hype in its own interest first, concerned about losing market share to the OpenAI’s of the world and other upstarts. Big tech is now in a GenAI arms race, so prone to saying, doing, and selling anything that creates revenue and market share for it.
Some incumbents like Microsoft have invested tens of billions of dollars to dominate GenAI tech…I.e., OpenAI.
The mistake Microsoft has made is in the approach and market fit calculations. Microsoft’s product development is mainly based on the huge investment it has made in OpenAI…it’s too big to fail.
They’ve invested and integrated AI features into their product suite but doing so by discounting demand-side considerations. Simply, whether or not people actually want or need these products. Most harmful, they have not innovated and have not addressed customer pain points toward solving their problems.
Instead, Microsoft has slapped a chatbot onto their Windows suite and called it a new value-added feature: Microsoft’s Copilot. I guess they believe that if they throw enough hype and marketing narratives at it, they can convince consumers to buy it.
I wouldn’t call it putting lipstick on a pig but I would say that this new “Copilot” is certainly not attractive from a meaningful innovative value-added perspective.
Nevertheless, this approach has worked in the past but over time it’s rarely ever sustainable. People will try it out but eventually if isn’t of good utility and produces real value in solving their pain points then usage fades.
Without a doubt, however, Microsoft Office Suite has been solving user problems for decades. However, the new Copilot feature is driven more by protecting or expanding market share than by identifying a real market fit and enhancing their problem-solving software.
To be real, big tech has been focusing on its own pain points and not those of customers, with a fixation on GenAI solutions because they’ve invested so much in OpenAI/ChatGPT. So big tech effectively discounts consumer intelligence and feels only they know what’s good for us. Forcing products we don’t need or want down our throats.
Nevertheless, the declining use of ChatGPT is being reported along with all its hallucinations and unreliability issues. And Pitchbook recently reported a 76% decline in GenAI investment in the first quarter of 2024. The writing on the wall seems to be developing.
Copilot was supposed to usher in a significant shift toward a more personal and intelligent computing future for users. Where AI will be seamlessly woven into the Windows ecosystem, simplifying and amplifying people’s computing experience.
In the end, however, Copilot is just a Chatbot, integrated into Microsoft’s suite that utilizes ChatGPT because it just has to — it spent billions for it after all.
As per Microsoft: the new 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with a company’s internal data from Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and Microsoft Power Platform. The Business Chat feature works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts.
Again, just a chatbot connected to a 365.
However, what the enterprise of the 21st century needs from software, is a unique competitive advantage component. We live in the information age and everyone has access to the same information… the same GPT type chatbots. So if everyone has access to the same things, how possibly can there be a competitive advantage?
OpenAI/GPT is degrading innovation and creativity and stifling new IP development, which is vitally necessary for the competitiveness factor in advancing our world. OpenAI is creating mediocrity, entitlement and laziness, none of which are friends to capitalist advancement.
But maybe Microsoft/OpenAI wants it that way — with them in control it just benefits the tech billionaire aristocracy most, but not society.
Therefore, we need a demand-side solution for organizations to generate insights for crafting their unique strategies to win in a competitive world.
GPT is a glorified search engine and at the end of the day, you’ll find no real substantial difference between “GPTs” and a Google search.
“…you don’t get much different information from an LLM than you do from a standard search engine. Those systems are still very limited, they don’t have any understanding of the underlying reality of the real world, because they are purely trained on text, a massive amount of text,”
— Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun at VivaTech Paris, 2024
Solving Customer Pain Points, First!
A Harvard Business Review (HBR)study confirmed that 85% of executives believe that their organizations diagnose most of their problems poorly, which costs management time, money, productivity, growth, and ultimately lost opportunities.
Increasingly, management executives are finding that ChatGPT use doesn’t add to efficiency or any real measurable value in the workplace. Secondly, astute business leaders are also recognizing that there is no value in hiring consultants in the information/evolving AI era.
Consultants, for example, don’t ever have their skin in the game, give boilerplate advisory, take tons of money from the organization and leave them with a PowerPoint presentation. Often, consulting recommendations never get implemented because management simply doesn’t have the time, or belt in the “work” the consultant did.
Therefore, if 85% of staff is diagnosing the organization’s problems, shouldn’t these same people be working to solve them too? This will save time and money and add value to the organization by staff doing their own research and learning to problem solve, which leads to creating solutions efficiently themselves.
Continuous problem-solving is an everyday thing in business, so those closest to the problems…staff. Are best suited to understand and be better problem solvers than consultants ever could be.
So, regardless of whether the company is a start-up, growth, or an incumbent. Solving problems is fundamental and done best internally.
Understanding the sequences of solving problems relative to applying the right technology is imperative. So internalized organizational problem-solving requires building strategies for growth and operational efficiencies.
Therefore, what makes sense in the digital age is finding and applying the right software tools that empower people within organizations to craft strategies with their internal teams.
Democratizing GenAI, engineering it properly and utilizing it purposefully can empower people and their organizations to develop the right strategies for various problems.
Another HBR article on Change Management, titled Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology; says that many companies are pouring millions into “digital transformation” initiatives but a high percentage of them fail to pay off. And much of that failure is due to these companies’ failure to “leverage insiders” it says.
“Organizations that seek transformations (digital and otherwise) frequently bring in an army of outside consultants who tend to apply one-size-fits-all solutions in the name of best practices.” — HBR
The article recommends that leaders approach transformation not by relying on consultants but on “insiders” instead — their staff. Staff have intimate knowledge about how the problem was created and what works and doesn’t work.
With access to online research, there is no justifiable reason to be spending tens, hundreds and millions on consultants, when with a little work and organization, internal teams can do strategy themselves.
Further, when employees perceive that digital transformation could threaten their jobs they may consciously or subconsciously resist those changes. If the digital transformation then turns out to be ineffective, management will eventually abandon the effort and their jobs will be saved (or so the thinking goes). Either way, none of this is good for the organization and its people.
However, when leaders recognize those fears and then empower workers to take on digital transformation themselves, without outsiders, it creates opportunities for employees to upgrade their expertise and feel good about their contributions to enterprise productivity and value creation.
When key employees are asked to examine what their unique contributions to the organization are or can become and connect those strengths to the digital transformation process. This creates a greater sense of purpose and responsibility which brings out their entrepreneurial spirit to the benefit of the organization.
In the case study provided in the article, a sales team had been tasked to consider adopting artificial intelligence to increase their productivity. But, how AI should be deployed remained an open question to them.
Ultimately, the team did their research and came up with a solution that called for customizing an AI tool to optimize each salesperson’s efforts, by suggesting which customers to call, when to call them and what to say during the call. This tool also contained a gamification component which made the selling process more interesting.
The building of the software had to be contracted out, but the enterprise saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by not using consultants in the preamble.
Ultimately, it was said that the solution made selling more fun, which translated into an increase in customer satisfaction and a 10% increase in sales. Staff continues to iterate and upgrade, and delivering value to the enterprise.
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