The Great AI Tool Explosion: Separating Value From Noise

Every week a leadership team is shown another AI capability that promises to change everything. Most of it is a feature looking for a business case. The question is not whether the technology works — increasingly it does — but whether the value it creates is bigger than the cost of running it, integrating it and teaching people to trust it.

The useful filter is commercial, not technical. Does this reduce cost to serve, increase conversion, shorten a cycle time, or make a scarce person more productive? If you cannot name the line it moves, you are buying an experiment. Experiments are fine, as long as you call them that and cap what they consume.

The organisations getting real value are doing fewer things properly: clean data in the places that matter, two or three use cases with owners and numbers, and a clear architectural view of where AI sits relative to commerce, CRM and service. That is unglamorous work, and it is the work.