AI's having a great time. Are you?
Sales drafts outreach with it and summarizes calls in seconds. Finance runs first-pass models before a human touches the spreadsheet. Legal redlines contracts overnight. Support triages a ticket before anyone on the team sees it. Marketing turns a brief into copy before the meeting about the brief wraps up. The tools work. People use them without being told to.
Here's where it breaks. The sales rep's outreach gets written for her — her actual bottleneck was never the writing, it was deciding who to write to, and nothing touched that. Support's tickets triage faster; nobody redesigned what she does with the hour she got back, so it quietly fills with something else. Legal drafts overnight and still reviews every clause the way a junior associate would, because "review" was built for catching a person's mistakes, not a model's.
Redesign has to move at the pace the rollout did — days, not months — and reach every group the tool actually touches. Skip that step, and the adoption just sits there, unconverted. What gets reported instead is usage. Login counts. Training completion. None of it says whether the job changed.
There's a second cost underneath. Pick use cases without first mapping, task by task, what's automatable, what's augmentable, what's genuinely human — and the use cases that get chosen are the easy ones. Draft this. Summarize that. They look fine in a review meeting and change nothing in how the team actually works.
AI is having its day in every function that's touched it. The redesign underneath it is optional. The gap it leaves behind isn't.