If you spend even just a few minutes online reading about how businesses are leveraging AI, you might start thinking it will solve every operational challenge ever faced. Now, we’re not about to rain on the AI parade. The promise of automated content, smarter systems, personalization and cleaner data is real and we’re here for it.
But here’s what we keep seeing: before AI helps you move faster or do more, it usually shows you where you're stuck and highlights the issues you've been working around.
And that just might be its most overlooked value.
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AI shines a light on the problems you’ve learned to live with
You can’t use AI to describe your products if half the fields in your catalog are missing or inconsistent.
You can’t train a model to make product recommendations when your compatibility data is scattered across spreadsheets and email threads.
You can’t generate useful content when every team defines the same product three different ways.
What happens instead? AI gives you results that either feel wrong or don’t work at all. Not because the AI is broken, but because the systems underneath it are.
While uncovering friction can feel frustrating at first, it’s also incredibly helpful. It helps you identify the weak spots quickly. You see where your systems don’t connect, where your data needs work, and where teams are misaligned.
AI forces conversations that were easy to avoid
A manufacturer recently engaged us to explore how AI could streamline the creation of product page content. On the surface, it’s a straightforward goal. But as we began discussing the process with their team, it quickly became clear that the challenge wasn’t the technology. The challenge was alignment. Product, marketing, and engineering each had a different idea of what the content should be.
Rather than pushing forward with content generation, we paused and facilitated the conversations that hadn’t happened yet. We helped the team define tone, structure, and critical business rules, creating a shared foundation that made future automation possible.
In this way, AI is as much about alignment as it is about automation. It becomes a mechanism for surfacing assumptions and inconsistencies, then finding ways to resolve them.
The big wins usually happen internally first
It’s certainly true that AI can be leveraged in all aspects of a business, but the first realization of value our clients see from AI is not related to the customer journey or external-facing websites. It’s internal.
Things like:
- Cleaning up inconsistent product structures
- Defining ownership around data
- Making decisions faster across teams
- Getting rid of duplicate work
It’s not flashy, but these internal wins make a big difference for the people who have to keep the engine running. And they unlock the potential for bigger, customer-facing wins later on.
The real opportunity with AI might not be what it builds, but what it reveals
When AI reveals confusion, disagreement, or bad data, that’s not a failure. It’s a signal. You learn where your systems are out of sync, where data is missing, and where teams aren’t aligned.
You stop looking at AI as the answer and, instead, start using it to ask better questions.
Need a place to start?
We help our clients cut through the noise and use AI where it actually helps. Especially when it feels messy. If you're curious about where AI could accelerate your business, we'd love to talk. Reach out here.
