You can't automate a mess.

Automating a broken process does not fix it. It just breaks it faster.

For owners.

Before you spend a dollar on AI, here is what the big companies just learned the expensive way: most of their AI projects flopped, and not because the technology was bad.

A widely cited MIT report on generative-AI pilots found that the vast majority never made it into real use. Big budgets, real engineers, and most of the projects still went nowhere. The models worked fine. What killed them was getting bolted onto messy, undocumented processes nobody had cleaned up first.

The AI did not fail. It just ran a broken process faster. Here is the part that is good news for you: fixing the process is cheap, and you get to learn that lesson for free while the Fortune 500 pays for it.

Three questions to ask before you automate anything.

Step 1  ·  "Could I write down exactly how this gets done every time?"

If the answer is no, you do not have a process. You have a habit. Write it down first.

Step 2  ·  "Does everyone who does this task do it the same way?"

If not, standardize it before you touch an AI tool. Otherwise you are just automating chaos.

Step 3  ·  "If this task ran 100 times in a row, would the outcome be the same?"

That is the bar. If you can answer yes, you are ready to automate. If not, go back to step one.

Before we write a single line of code for a client, we map the process. We almost always find three things that need to be fixed before automation makes sense. That mapping session is where the real work happens.

Your move

Forward this to another owner who thinks they are ready for AI but has not documented a single process.

Questions? Just reply to this email. A real person (me, Cam) reads every one.