How to Start With AI in a Company

Over the past days I was at home in Slovakia. I talked to friends and to family, and something caught me off guard.

The way one of my family members described a firm they had gone to look at for a day.

They hold their data in several different tools. They join it by hand, in spreadsheets. Somebody moves information from one place to another and puts it together, all by hand.

Once again I realised that this is the ordinary state of firms, and that I live in a bubble that keeps moving further away.

I realised that when somebody in an average firm today says do not do it by hand, use AI, they will probably not be understood. If the firm has not automated anything so far, they will not be understood.

A person who runs such a firm or works in one probably does not understand what they hear in the media and on social networks about how everything somewhere is handled by AI agents and everything is automated. They do not understand the language of the AI echo chamber.

I have been writing about this gap for a long time, in posts such as The Gap Between Professionals Has Never Been as Wide as It Is in the AI Era.

In Why AI adoption fails when the tools are already there I wrote about those who have the models and the connectors ready and still do not use them.

Most firms, however, do not even have the basic connectors or any other links between the individual tools they use.