Is There a Disconnect Between AI Vendors and Customers?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Artificial Intelligence  

Artificial intelligence is still fairly new. As a result, there is rapid advancement of the capabilities—and expansion of the use cases for those capabilities. Software companies—whether dedicated to AI or simply integrating it into other functionality—are investing massive amounts of time, effort and money to try and build leading tools that will outdo their competition and drive sales of software and services.

I can’t criticize them for that. If they didn’t make those investments, then they would fall behind their rivals and risk being perceived as suppliers of outdated solutions. That can be a fatal reputation to gain.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t see problems in the approach that many software companies are taking. And by far the biggest problem is the disconnect between what many companies are selling—and what their customers want to buy.

The adoption deficit
I have never heard any organization tell me that they have successfully implemented every AI tool that they have access to in every use case that they can think of. The vast majority are nowhere near that point—literal years away from being fully AI-enabled, even with today’s capabilities. And where they are leveraging AI, there is generally still a need to refine and improve the tools, processes and governance.

In part, that’s …

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