Design the Work Before You Buy the Technology

McKinsey found that companies generating significant value from AI were about three times as likely to have fundamentally redesigned workflows - 74% against 25%. What that finding leaves open is sequence, and sequence is what I keep coming back to.

Sequence matters because sequence often reveals how an organization has framed the problem. If the first question is, "Which platform should we buy?" then the organization has already positioned AI primarily as a technology decision.

I prefer to begin somewhere else.

What business outcome are we trying to improve? How does value flow through the work today? Where are the points of friction, delay, duplication, or unnecessary complexity? What work should disappear altogether? What work should be augmented? Where does human judgment create the greatest value? And, most importantly, what becomes newly possible now that AI exists?

Only after those questions are answered should the conversation move toward technology.

My doctoral research on digital transformation reinforced this broader leadership requirement. Successful transformation depends on strategic vision, execution, trust, alignment, customer-centered thinking, market awareness, and the ability to mobilize people around change. The technology matters, but technology alone does not redesign the enterprise.

I sometimes describe the opposite approach as shopping before designing the house. We can absolutely buy the beautiful refrigerator first. We simply should not be surprised when we later discover that it does not fit through the kitchen door.

That is also why I believe AI strategy needs architecture — not architecture as a technical diagram executives politely admire for twelve seconds, but architecture as a systems discipline that connects strategic intent to enterprise execution.

Does your organization design the future state first and select the technology second, or select the technology first and then determine where it belongs?

The order may determine the value.