AI without a strategy is just another expensive toy
I don’t know about you but when I settle down for my evening doom scroll, I get peppered with ads from influencers telling me another profession is obsolete and I should sign up to their course that promises to transform my business overnight. The reality however, is a bit less dramatic. While there are definitely incredible leaps in the space and we have moved into the era of practical application in business, AI alone is not a silver bullet.
Why? Because AI without a plan is just another expensive toy.
We know this because at Sprint: we build automations.
We've been evaluating and using AI as each new model, platform and framework has been released. AI is now a part of our automation toolkit. Our developers use it when building systems, and we’ve deployed AI enabled features for our clients that extract, transform and load (ETL) data. On the more experimental side we’ve been testing Openclaw and built our own tool for agent-based natural language access to multiple systems for business intelligence and automation.
Whatever the right solution might be, our advice is: do not dive into the deep end without a plan. It is easy to declare a broad-stroke objective of “we are now an AI first company”, but without a strategy you will burn time and money and end up in AI psychosis without a useful outcome.
Start by understanding your data and ensuring it is accurate. Then document your workflows and identify where manual processes and repetitive data entry are costing you time. For each issue, document the: 1) current process, 2) desired outcome, 3) data requirements and 4) what success looks like. Once you have these things thought out, you are in a position to explore what kind of solutions will fit.
