The Curation Engine

In an age of infinite answers, knowing what problems to solve is half the problem solved.

Small and medium-sized businesses, and, from what I hear, even pockets of large corporations are starting to adopt a ‘fail fast’ philosophy of startups. The easiest way to feel innovative is a subscription to AI tools, and every team member gets yanked onto an express train with the promise of expertise and efficiencies at extreme speed.

Team members feel their superpower. Emails, meetings and discussions get longer. Typed words flow flawlessly. The organization appears extremely energized, overly occupied with generating documents, and working overtime to keep up with an AI agent that doesn’t sleep. It’s like the dog walker being dragged by the dogs.

With ‘fail fast’ for an established company of any size, choosing what is allowed to fail is important. Curation is critical.

A supply chain manager talked of being inundated with AI generated agreements to review, and is left with no choice but to lean on AI to process them. They use AI for curating portions of the agreements that entail risks. The challenge is different for marketers on the other side of that table.

Marketers who generate content and documents using AI need an even stronger curation method because marketing, if not tailored and focused, backfires.

Curation can prevent unfettered AI in marketing. The recent case of an AI agent acting independently, making hundreds of attempts at booking a restaurant reservation is an indication of what businesses can expect at both ends, procurement and sales.

The reason this needs attention is because they aren’t internal to an organization. They impact outsiders. They impact a company’s brand and how customers will feel about it.

Excessive social media posts without original content that’s useful or entertaining, or both, get tuned out before we can spell ‘cadence’.

It is not just content generation that speeds up. It’s the underlying processes on fast-forward mode. Decision making will stumble as matters start piling up awaiting approval.

Curation diverts traffic for closer attention. Curation allows a team or a management to stay focused on the most important aspects of the business operation. Curation probably works best when it’s supported by accounting. Curation may take the form of reverse-engineering that single metric, the back of the envelope calculation, the rule of thumb that serves as the barometer for a business. It might help to curate for those specific levers of the organization’s survival and growth.

Curate the processes which impact sales and collections. Accounts receivables not collected negate every activity that culminates in a sale.

Curate market research information as AI can overwhelm the corporate cognitive capacity with incessant noise.

Curate the marketing messages that go out into the world and form brand perceptions.

The curation engine regulates the speed of the AI train where it really matters, especially at crossings where machine meets humans.

Photo credit: Matt Nelson on Unsplash

Choosing AI Contact over Eye Contact

 

AI transformation of businesses might be on a leash, with human checkpoints to navigate.

“Do you use AI for your work?” I asked the seasoned sales professional seated next to me on the boat ride to a trade show venue. “Hell, no!” he said before I could finish my question. He goes to trade shows where his customers gather, he gets to look them in the eye and have conversations with them. Eye contact remains critical to his success.

This AI-contact versus eye-contact is something I find myself asking almost anyone I meet in my professional, and lately, even social circles. I have a good friend who’s ‘forward deployed’ so I remain curious how fast transformations can realistically move.

Companies are experimenting with AI agents as employees. Let’s call them AImployees, cheesy as it may sound. This kind of drastic AI transformation effort is worth observation in the context of the recent news about how AI agents operate, collaborate in swarms, and break boundaries in a manner that simply overwhelms human auditors forcing them to rely on other AI agents just to review the copious swarm-chats. That records decipherable by humans were a part of the AI agents’ modus operandi is noteworthy. It indicates a presumption of a human checkpoint.

Visualize AI as a child that is being trained for a function and it begins to explore the world outside to learn. Current AI transformation efforts are akin to putting the insatiably curious child on a leash to give organizations a sense of control.

Organizations moving boldly towards AI transformations must prepare to let go of the leash sooner rather than later. The human checkpoints will not matter. In its infancy, AI is the baby tiger that purrs and looks like a kitten. It’s still a tiger.

For AI transformations to find a fan following through a demonstration of early success, efforts must focus on business functions that do not require human checkpoints. A possible use case of uninterrupted end-to-end successful AI transformation could be the procurement of spare parts or consumables which are standardized or commoditized to such an extent that it’s drudgery for a human to deal with it month after month. In such an instance, not only will the human checkpoint gratefully delegate the task to an aimployee, but also know that there are built-in guardrails to isolate any part of the procurement process or spares that are non-standard.

In this instance, the salesperson may not care about making eye-contact with the buyer except when a reorder quantity changes dramatically from the norm, requiring an escalation.

Business functions designed to convince humans making purchasing decisions may not see successful overnight transformations. Those transformations will be gradual, barely noticeable, limited by the capacity of those humans in procurement.

Until humans persist in procurement processes, AI transformation will be governed by an organization’s capacity for eye-contact, warm handshakes, a patient ear, empathy to understand a market’s pain, and human testimonials.