I recently tuned into a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, and they dropped a stat that made me sit up: Only 10% of companies really knocked it out of the park with AI. Naturally, my first thought was “Well, what had the other 90% done?” The discussion covered all sorts of reasons why only a select few companies are hitting it out of the park with AI. But one example from the healthcare industry really tickled my funny bone.
Healthcare, an industry that still loves its fax machines (Yeah, those ancient relics that should be in a museum), decided to get all fancy and use AI for optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from scanned fax images. Sure, it worked - saved someone the joy of manually typing out those faxes. But here’s the kicker: Why are people still faxing anything in the first place?
It’s like using a high-tech drone to deliver a message in a bottle. Cool, but why not just send an email?
The magic of AI isn’t just in automating old, creaky processes-it’s in rethinking and redesigning them for the digital age. Imagine if all that information was sent digitally from the get-go. No faxes, no OCR, no AI needed to rescue us from the 1980s. Just pure efficiency, accuracy, and scalability.
This hits home for the oil and gas industry, too. We’ve got AI fever, but sometimes we’re so focused on getting it to fix our old processes that we forget to ask: Do these processes even make sense anymore? AI is fantastic at crunching numbers and spotting patterns, but it really shines when we give it a problem that’s worth solving in the first place.
So, if we want to join that elite 10%, maybe it’s time to stop polishing faxes and start imagining what we could do if we ditched them altogether. Let’s use AI to innovate, not just automate.
#NotJustAutomate #StepChange #ArtificialIntelligence #DigitalTransformation