I spend too much of my working life trying to explain the difference between AI-enabled and AI-centric, and most of the time my own explanation still falls a little flat, even to me.
This week, mid-thought, a piece of live client work handed me the answer before I’d finished reaching for it.
A role central to turning a business’s raw numbers into something the board can act on had come up for replacement. My first instinct, the same one most people have, was to automate what that person did. Faster extraction, faster analysis, faster slides.
Then I caught myself. That instinct was AI-enabled thinking. Speed up the existing process, keep everything else exactly as it was.
The more interesting question was sitting right underneath it: does this process need to exist at all? Imagine the source systems feeding a live database instead, an AI layer sitting on top, queryable through a chat interface, giving leadership a constant, current view of the business rather than a snapshot built weeks after the fact. No report. No monthly cycle. Just the business, visible, all the time.
That’s the moment AI-centric stopped being a phrase I use and became something I actually understood properly myself.
Next time you reach for the faster version of something in your own business, have you actually asked whether it needs to exist at all, or just assumed that it should?
If you would like to explore where an AI-centric approach could change how your business runs, I would be glad to talk. You can read more about our services or get in touch.
This article was first shared as a post on LinkedIn.