Paralysis Won't Win the AI Race

A lot of companies, especially large ones, are drowning in committee culture around AI. They have so many people offering different perspectives, all focused on making the absolute best first investment in artificial intelligence. And the challenge is that most companies don't actually understand what AI is or how it will impact their business.

They're trying to perfect a decision while the technology and its applications are changing at light speed. What ends up happening? They fall behind. They miss learning those initial lessons of what works, what doesn't, how to train users, and what problems arise when rolling solutions out internally.

This continuous game of waiting ultimately hurts them versus companies willing to take a first step. Even if that step is wrong, they're doing something. Even if those early efforts fail, they're learning what works and what doesn't. Their next iteration is more likely to succeed.

The Biggest Paradigm Shift in Decades

This is one of the largest paradigm shifts in how businesses will function in decades, arguably even bigger than the internet, and certainly happening much faster. Every minute counts. There will be massive disruption, and the one way to ensure you fall behind is by spending too much time trying to make the perfect decision.

Here's the truth: there is no perfect decision. The worst decision you can make is no decision at all.

Here at Nomad Data, we had one company using our technology to edit reports they were generating. The goal was to produce high-quality edits so their ultimate work product could be better. Through this process, they learned a lot about their own workflows. They discovered their initial step wasn't aggressive enough and realized they could do more.

They had the context for this insight because they had taken that first step and were actually seeing the technology work in real life situations, in their exact business, doing parts of their job. Was it the absolute best first step? No, absolutely not. They didn't know what the technology was at its core. They weren't sure how it would impact their business, but they did take a step. That quickly led them to develop other ideas about maximizing the technology and ultimately led to a second, more successful iteration.

Two Paths to AI Success

We've seen two situations where companies successfully take that first step with AI. One is where a single person has the power and incentive to make a change and implement something. We work with companies where they've put a hat on someone and said, "You're the AI champion. Make something happen." These individuals are incentivized to act, and often, the companies don't even know what they're trying to do with AI. They just know they need to do something.

These folks iterate very quickly, and we get to something that works very quickly too. The other successful situation occurs with smaller companies, maybe a couple hundred employees at most, where they don't have anyone specifically responsible for AI. They know this will be a big shift. They know they're not the experts. And they're willing to partner and just start making changes, running pilots. We've seen some of these small companies completely revolutionize how they perform different tasks by supplementing them with AI.

The Organizational Muscle of Mistake-Making

What these successful companies share is the ability to make mistakes, for people to be wrong. Many companies aren't set up for that. In those environments, individuals' careers will significantly suffer if their first move isn't successful. They'll lose political capital, and someone else will try to take the baton from them.

Those companies struggle because people are scared of making the wrong decision. In a more mature technological area, you'd see people choose the incumbent technology provider because they don't want to risk getting fired. But AI is interesting because there really are no incumbents. None of the products are mature, so all face the risk they won't work out.

If decision makers can afford to make mistakes, and the organization supports people experimenting and sometimes failing, then they're more likely to take this first step and ultimately succeed.

Given these learnings, we tend to avoid companies stuck in decision paralysis. We've seen their inability to make decisions, and we can't invest time changing their culture. That's something they need to figure out themselves. We focus on those who can make decisions, take risks, and be first movers.

The Minimum Viable AI Experiment

There's not one universal experiment that works for everyone, but at Nomad Data, we typically have one or two discovery meetings where we identify friction or pain points within the organization that we can automate with AI. We look for problems where we can very quickly go from idea to value.

We narrow in on that idea, sign an agreement to do a quick proof of concept, get materials from them (reports, insurance claims, investment memos, or whatever raw materials are in play), build the proof of concept, and demo it back to them with their own data in their own process, usually within a week.

That demonstration is eye-opening. Once they see it live, for the first time they really understand what AI is and what it could potentially mean for their business. No matter how many sales presentations we give or slide decks we share, people don't get it until they see it working on their own tasks.

The Competitive Advantage Gap

The biggest impacts from AI adoption will be on cost structure. We have a client that was on the verge of hiring dozens of people due to significant growth in their core business. It's a business where margins are everything. By implementing AI, they've automated away the need for those several dozen hires, which means they can offer the same service at a far lower price than their competition.

This means they'll take more and more share. As they gobble up business from competitors and new business that arrives, other competitors won't be able to catch up. They won't have the volumes to take advantage of this technology. It's very much a land grab that affects not only your ability to sell new products but also your ability to service those products at lower costs.

Unlocking Organizational Creativity

Beyond efficiency, the biggest benefit is the creativity AI spurs. The second employees get their hands on the technology involved in their actual job, a light bulb goes off in their head, and they start to imagine all the possibilities.

That's been an interesting thing about artificial intelligence technology. When we think about AI over the last 50 years, it's mostly been the stuff of science fiction. We've all read books about robots building cars, lifting objects or cleaning our homes. We've imagined that for decades.

But what we didn't imagine is computers that could really think, that could actually mimic human behavior and perform white-collar tasks. We haven't imagined all the uses for this. This technology just showed up one day, and the technology is ahead of our imagination.

The goal of these quick proofs of concept is to get that technology into the hands of real people doing real work so they can do that ideation, get those creative juices flowing, and come up with ideas of how to best take advantage of it.

Building a Culture That Enables Action

You have to have a culture that allows failure, where failure is encouraged on the way to success. No one is going to come up with the right answer the first time, especially with a technology so new. Experimentation is everything. Trial and error is key.

You have to expect failure and iteration. If you have a culture that expects every decision to be perfect, and when it isn't that person loses their job, is demoted, or passed over for promotion, you'll end up in an environment where people are afraid to take any risk, and no one will want to own any decision. That's why you end up with committees, because then nobody owns the decision. The committee owns the decision.

The Knowledge Advantage

Early adopters gain specific knowledge about what AI is capable of and what it's not. They learn how its intelligence applies to daily tasks, what it knows, what it doesn't know, how it's trained, and how it evolves over time.

These are advanced concepts, but in the real world, most people buying AI don't even really know what it is. They barely understand the solution they're buying or how it will impact their job until they use it that first time and start to see the successes and failures. It is critical to get going as soon as possible.

The Moment of Transformation

At Nomad Data, we implement AI solutions tailored to company-specific processes day in and day out. The reaction is always shock. Even though people have read about this stuff or maybe used a copilot or ChatGPT, they can't believe what they're seeing when it's actually implemented in something they understand.

We had one customer during onboarding who didn't believe the technology would impact their specific role. We gave them a demo anyway because they had access to the tool their company had purchased. After about five minutes, the individual was speechless. He told us his entire life had changed. His entire perspective on the world had changed, and he couldn't even continue the conversation because he needed to reflect and get back to me. That person is now an extremely active user of our technology. We find that's a common reaction. It doesn't really click until you see it.

Taking the First Step

The first step is to find a partner. That's what we aim to be at Nomad Data. We aim to be your AI enablement partner. We essentially train an AI to perform tasks within your organization, highly customized to the way your business works and to specific processes in your business.

You need this kind of partner to guide you through the process because a company that doesn't build this technology day in and day out won't understand all the nuances. It's a very fast-moving space. That's really the first decision you need to make: who is going to be your initial partner on this journey?

The AI revolution is happening right now, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. Perfect is the enemy of progress. Take that first step, learn from it, and keep moving forward. The companies that act today, even imperfectly, will be the winners of tomorrow.