“I’ve given AI to everyone. Now it’ll sort the company out.”
The one saying it is Aldo — who built the company himself, cool box brought from home because the bar charges three times as much. The one answering is Rocco, the expert from the sun lounger next door, who agrees before Aldo even finishes. “Exactly. Put it on everything, like salt.”
Aldo doesn’t have to convince anyone. Cesare, who does the CEO job professionally and was sitting there the other day, had to bring something to the board: an uncomfortable constraint, and the only moment when a person is forced to say what they want to achieve. Aldo answers only to himself. He decides on Monday morning and goes. That’s why the company exists — and it’s also why nobody will ever ask him that question.
Before saying where he goes wrong I have to say where I was. Twenty years inside software, and I’ve seen this scene dozens of times. A process was missing, so they’d buy the management system. The management system arrived, and the process continued not to exist: there was just a tidy place to write the data of the disorder. Software doesn’t imprint a method where the method isn’t there. At best it records one.
With AI the same rule applies — and there’s an aggravating factor. The management system, at least, imposed a way of working: rigid, often wrong, but one single way for everyone. AI imposes nothing. It takes the shape of what you already do. It doesn’t fix the missing process — it runs it as it is.
Look at what happens. People have the tool. Some manage on their own, and the path they find alone is often good. Each their own. The work that repeats itself every morning stays where it was, done by hand, with a few pieces that now fly through it. Nobody designed anything. The mess from before is still there, just running at higher revs.
Salt enhances what it finds on the plate. It doesn’t make the plate.
Aldo didn’t buy structure. He bought speed, and put it on top of things as they were.
The answer isn’t “processes first, then AI” — that’s the sentence of someone who wants to postpone for two years. You don’t need to redo the menu. Take one job, just one, the kind that comes back every week: the quotes, the reminders, the service reports. Decide how it gets done, once, and write it already thinking about AI.
First the plate. Then the salt.