The most valuable AI opportunities in a mid-market business are usually invisible from the outside.

The most valuable AI opportunities in a mid-market business are usually invisible from the outside.

Not because they are mysterious.

Because they are embarrassingly specific.

They live in the workaround someone invented three years ago. The report nobody questions. The customer pattern sales knows but operations never sees. The exception path that kept the business moving and quietly became the business.

Generic AI advice misses this because it optimises for patterns across companies.

But advantage comes from patterns inside one company.

That is the trap in a lot of AI programs: leaders buy capability before they have done discovery. So the tool gets pointed at the obvious workflow, the first automation idea, the thing already visible on a process map.

And then it either fails, or worse, succeeds at scaling the wrong thing.

It speeds up the workaround.
It automates away the customer signal.
It turns one person’s tacit knowledge into a single point of failure with a nicer interface.

The work is not asking, “Where can we use AI?”

The work is finding the parts of the business that are too specific for a generic vendor deck to understand.

That is where the waste is.

And usually, that is where the moat is too.

Learn more: https://leverageai.com.au/wp-content/media/articles/22-ai-think-tank.html

Originally posted on LinkedIn