AI should have to compete with deletion.

Position

Before you invest in AI to make a process faster, you must first ask if the process should exist at all. AI should have to compete with deletion.

Why We Think This

When an organization feels overwhelmed by work, the instinct is to buy tools to help people do the work faster. But this assumes all the work is necessary.

In our experience, up to 30% of internal processes in a fast-growing company exist only to support other internal processes. They create no customer value. If you apply AI or automation to these processes, you institutionalize them. You make them permanent, hiding the underlying friction behind a veneer of speed.

The Common Alternative

"Let's just get an AI assistant for everyone, it will save 20% of their time on reporting."

Evidence / Observation

Across multiple historical operating cases, recurring patterns included teams spending hours summarizing data for approvals that were rarely challenged. When we introduced automated reporting, the time to generate the report dropped, but the time spent reviewing it actually increased because the volume of data generated was higher. The true solution was not faster generation; it was changing the decision rights so the report wasn't needed in the first place.

Where This Position May Fail

Deletion is not always possible. Compliance, legal requirements, and essential quality controls cannot simply be deleted. In highly regulated environments, automating an essential but tedious process is a massive win. Deletion applies to self-inflicted coordination work, not structurally required work.

Practical Consequence

Before you automate anything, ask: What would happen if we just stopped doing this entirely?

If the answer is "nothing," then delete the work. Deletion is free. Deletion requires zero maintenance. Deletion creates immediate, permanent capacity. Automation is a liability that requires ongoing management.

Questions to Ask

• Who is the consumer of this process?
• If we stopped doing it for two weeks, what would break?
• Are we automating a bad process just to make it fail faster?