AI Replaces Effort, Not Understanding
With AI, power is with the business user.
They can develop apps, automate work and query data, just by simple prompts. No technical skills required.
On the surface, it looks promising.
Five years from now
Consider five years from now. Your organisation has multiple apps that are badly designed, do not integrate, and are siloed and messy.
Not because there is any issue with the technology.
But due to the lack of understanding of the big picture, the architecture, when giving power to business users to develop apps using AI.
Due to little or no use of business analysts and process improvement, so the apps automate the process as it is, not as it should be.
Due to not following a relational database structure, so the AI-generated reports are only as clean as the data underneath them. And the data underneath is messy.
None of this shows up on day one. Each app works on its own. Each report answers the question it was asked. The mess only becomes visible when someone tries to connect them, and by then it is already built.
The value has changed, not the need
With AI, every profession and its value has been changed. But many are still relevant.
Business analysis, BI, change management and process mapping are disciplines that have been enhanced due to AI. They are not made redundant by it.
AI makes building faster. It does not make deciding what to build any easier. It can write the app, but it cannot tell whether the app should exist, where it fits, or what it will break.
That judgement still has to come from somewhere.
The mistake
The mistake many businesses are making is assuming that AI will replace current disciplines.
What AI replaces is the effort. What it cannot replace is the understanding. And when we remove the people who bring that understanding, we do not remove the need for it. We only remove the moment where someone would have asked the right question.
So who in your organisation is looking at the whole picture while everyone else is building their part of it?
And if no one is, how long before the mess becomes the system?
