Last week, I asked you to step back and identify where your business isn’t running as well as it should.

Most people can do that pretty quickly. There’s usually a part of the business that feels slower than it should be, more manual than it should be, or harder to manage than it needs to be. That’s a good starting point.

But here’s where most businesses go next—and where things start to break down: They assume the solution is technology.

More specifically right now, they assume the solution is AI.

In last month’s Ask the CFO session on AI with Ken Scales, we spent a lot of time talking about this idea without always saying it directly. Ken Scales made a comment that captures it well:

“Why do you have a cash flow issue? We’re not getting invoices out on time… why not? We’re not getting the information we need.”

That’s how most operational problems actually work. There’s a chain, and somewhere along that chain, something is unclear, inconsistent, or simply not owned.

I saw this play out recently with a client. They were dealing with reporting issues at month-end and spending hours cleaning things up. The assumption was that it was a system problem, something that needed to be automated or improved with better tools.

When we stepped back and looked at the process, the issue was much simpler. A key step didn’t have a clear owner anymore. Someone had left the company, and the responsibility never got reassigned. The work was getting done inconsistently, depending on who had time.

Once we clarified ownership and tightened the process, the issue went away. No new system. No automation. No AI.

This is the part that matters. AI doesn’t fix broken processes. It tends to expose them. If you take a process that’s unclear or inconsistent and try to automate it, you don’t get a better outcome—you just get faster inconsistency. Before you think about tools, it’s worth taking a closer look at how the work is actually getting done.

If you want to do something practical with this, go back to the area you identified last week and walk through it step by step:

• What are the exact steps from start to finish?
• Where does the information come from at each step?
• Who is clearly responsible for each part of the process?
• Where does it tend to break down, slow down, or require extra cleanup?

You don’t need to overcomplicate it. The goal is just to see the process more clearly.

In most cases, you’ll find that the issue isn’t a lack of tools. It’s a lack of clarity, consistency, or ownership. And once you fix that, you’re in a much better position to decide whether automation—or AI—actually makes sense.