“What can I do with AI?” is the wrong question. The better one is: what value can I actually get out of it?
Automating a broken process just makes it faster
Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2026 report ↗ points to a Gartner forecast from June 2025 ↗ that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. Gartner gives escalating costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls as the reasons. Deloitte’s reading is that many organisations are automating broken processes instead of redesigning them, and its advice is short: redesign, don’t automate.
I agree with that conclusion. If a process is already messy, AI just makes the mess faster.
Three questions before you automate
- Reimagine. If you were building this process on day one, what would it look like? Start from the outcome, not from the steps you happen to follow today.
- Orchestrate, don’t just manage. AI is becoming less of a chatbot and more of a foundation for how work gets done. Think of yourself as the lead of a team of people and AI agents, and decide who does what.
- Redesign first. Break the workflow down, fix the messy parts, and only then decide what to hand to AI.
An example: my carousel workflow
When I built the Carousel Content Engine, the quick fix would have been to keep starting each carousel from a blank prompt and simply ask AI to go faster. Instead, the workflow is redesigned around clear steps: a reusable brand profile, a brief, strategy and slide copy, a branded HTML preview, a human review, and only then export and publishing. The AI drafts at each step; I own the brief and the final review.
That’s the difference between automating a process and redesigning it.