Putting “AI” on the Door Changes Nothing

Every time a major technology shift arrives, perfectly normal companies suddenly start persuading themselves they are no longer what they were six months earlier.

Recruitment firms become AI talent platforms. PMOs become AI transformation offices. Outsourcing firms become intelligent automation specialists. System integrators suddenly discover cognitive orchestration. Consultancies wedge “AIenabled” into every service line they already had.

And for a short while, it may even work.

The CEO has read a new book. A few senior people have been on a course. The website gets refreshed.

LinkedIn profiles are rewritten. Conference lanyards start appearing with AI splashed across them in giant letters. Everyone rushes to reposition themselves before somebody else gets there first.

Fear does a lot of the heavy lifting. Nobody wants to look old-fashioned while everybody else is racing around claiming they have discovered the future.

My inbox is now full of this guff every single day – Sundays included.

But let’s be frank – sticking “AI” before or after your company name does absolutely nothing on its own.

In fact, it can damage your credibility because most experienced buyers can see exactly what is happening and start wondering:

“What are these Charleys up to now?”

Some of my own long-standing associates are already doing it. I called one of them out on it recently and got the sort of answer you tend to get in these situations:

“One of the trainees updated the wording without enough oversight.”

Righto.

Underneath the new language, most firms remain fundamentally the same organisations they always were, with a few AI specialists and a rewritten sales deck bolted on.

That matters a lot more than people think.

An organisation that struggled to deliver large transformation programs before AI will probably struggle afterwards too – probably more.

A consultancy that lacked operational depth before AI does not magically acquire it because the sales deck now contains machine-learning diagrams and glowing blue graphics.

LinkedIn is already awash with this phony window-dressing stuff. Companies that could barely explain cloud architecture 18 months ago are suddenly presenting themselves as strategic AI advisers to major enterprises

The technology changes faster than organisational behaviour does. That is the part markets consistently forget.

We have seen this movie over and over again. E-business. Digital transformation. Cloud. Blockchain. Metaverse. Big data. Agile transformation. DevOps. Now AI.

That does not mean the underlying technologies are unimportant. Some genuinely reshape industries. AI probably will.

But the commercial stampede surrounding every new technology wave follows a remarkably familiar pattern. Huge numbers of firms convince themselves that changing the vocabulary around the business is the same thing as changing the business itself.

Usually it isn’t.

One of the clearest signs that a market is overheating is when everybody suddenly starts claiming to do exactly the same thing.

Real capability is much harder to reinvent than branding.

Most businesses are still governed by the same incentives, the same politics, the same dependency problems, the same fragmented accountability and the same tendency to underestimate execution complexity.

AI does not remove those things. In most cases it simply amplifies them.

Execution is still execution – with or without AI.

Which is why some of the eventual winners may not be the firms making the most noise about AI today.

They may simply be the organisations that already knew how to execute difficult work properly before AI arrived.

Because once the excitement dies down, customers still end up asking the same old questions:

• Can these people actually deliver?
• Do they understand operational reality?
• Can they handle complexity when things go wrong?
• Do they know what they are doing beyond the buzzwords?

And 18 months from now, after the AI logos, AI taglines and AI lanyards have disappeared again, the market will rediscover something it already knew before the hysteria started:

Real capability was never the part that was easy to fake.