I've lost count of the conversations that start like this.
Take a small business owner. Call him Dave, though he's really a dozen Daves I've met over the years. He runs a plumbing supply outfit and gets in touch with a simple ask. “Clive, I want AI to sort out my quotes. Everyone's doing it. Can we just add it in?”
In corporate speak, that's “bolt it on.” Three little words that carry a lot of implications.
Because when I ask Dave to walk me through how his quotes actually work, what emerges isn't a process at all. It's a series of workarounds held together by memory and goodwill. Spit and a prayer, as the old saying goes.
A quote starts as a phone call. Gets scribbled on a notepad. Moves to a spreadsheet, then an email, then sometimes into the accounting system. Three people touch it. None of them agree on the numbers. Customers wait days. Some walk.
Dave doesn't have an AI problem. He has a process that was broken to begin with.
Here's the uncomfortable reality I watch play out: AI doesn't fix broken processes. It accelerates them. If your workflow is a mess, bolting AI onto it just gives you a faster, more confident mess. Now you're generating wrong quotes in seconds instead of hours. And the chaos scales.
“So you're saying the bright shiny thing everyone's excited about won't help me?” Dave asks.
“
It won't help yet,” I say. “Not until we sort out your process first.”
So we do something far less exciting. We draw his quote process on a whiteboard. The real one, not the tidy version he thought existed. Within twenty minutes the problems are obvious to everyone in the room. Duplicated effort. No single source of truth. A pricing list that lives in one person's head.
We fix that first. Simple stuff. One shared template. One place the numbers live. A clear handoff between the person taking the call and the person sending the quote. No AI anywhere yet.
And here's the first win: that alone cuts his quote turnaround from three days to one. Before we've spent a cent on anything shiny.
If you're tempted to reach for AI right now, I'd gently ask you to pause and run through a few questions first:
- Can you draw the process on one page? If you can't map it clearly, no tool can. AI needs a defined path to walk. Give it a maze and it'll get lost faster than you.
- Do you know where the real bottleneck is? Often the delay isn't the task you think. Dave assumed writing quotes was slow. It wasn't. The handoffs were. AI would've optimised the wrong step.
- Is there a single source of truth? If your data lives in three spreadsheets and someone's head, AI will confidently pull from the wrong one. Rubbish in, rubbish out. Just louder.
- Have you removed the obvious waste first? Strip out the duplication before you automate. Otherwise you're paying to automate the waste.
- What does “good” look like? If you can't define success, you can't tell whether the tool delivered it.
Only after we've sorted his foundation do we revisit AI. And this time it slots in beautifully, drafting quote descriptions from a clean template, flagging pricing anomalies, freeing his team from the dull retyping. It works because there's finally something solid underneath it.
AI is a multiplier. And a multiplier applied to a broken number just gives you a bigger broken number.
So before you add the “clever” layer, ask yourself honestly: is the thing underneath actually working? Or are you about to make a mess move faster?
Which one is it, really?
#NexusConnectNZ #AIforBusiness #DigitalTransformation #DigitalLeadership