The pressing question every company or institution needs to ask itself today is: what do we want our organization to be able to do tomorrow that it can’t do today?
AI is the means, not the end
In a recent interview with the newspaper El Dínamo, Patricio Artiagoitía, founder and CEO of Novis, raised this question drawing on 25 years of accompanying more than 100 Latin American companies through their technology transformation: “the main mistake is thinking that AI is the product. The product is what you’re going to achieve for your business in the world thanks to artificial intelligence”.
Asked about the gap that exists today between the hype around AI and concrete results — in the United States, 90% of companies have AI programs, but only 6% report measurable results — Artiagoitía replied: “it will close when the tool moves into the background and companies start looking at the business process and asking what they’d like to happen. At that moment, they’ll realize that much of what they’d like to happen is easy to achieve. Things that nobody even used to consider are now easy to obtain”.
The key is to shift focus from the tool to the result. Success is measured in processes that used to take weeks and are now resolved in hours, services that weren’t profitable before and now are, decisions that used to be postponed for lack of information and are now made in real time.
The questions worth bringing to the management committee are: “which task in our customer service process could be resolved in seconds and with better quality if we redesigned it?” or “which decisions are we putting off for lack of analytical capacity, and what would happen if they were no longer postponed?”
Why this shift matters now
What makes this distinction urgent isn’t AI itself, but the speed at which the rest of the market is moving. The companies that grasped early that the internet wasn’t a tool but a new way of doing business built the platforms that dominate the world today. Those that saw it as “having a website” kept operating as before, but lost ground year after year.
The same thing is happening with AI, only much faster. In the interview, Artiagoitía puts it using football as a metaphor: “these disruptive technologies show up like a new pair of football boots that make you play much better. The teams that use them first start climbing the table. The same is happening now: companies that were small become large, while the big ones that don’t adapt may disappear.” And he sets a concrete timeframe: “I’d expect that, two years from now, we’ll see the standings of companies, governments and countries reshuffled, favoring those that do this well”.
An urgent exercise
If you lead a company or a department, there’s a simple exercise worth doing as soon as possible: take the three business processes that matter most to your results — not the three most visible ones, the three that move the needle most. For each one, ask: if I could rewrite this process from scratch today, without the systems and cost limitations we had three years ago, what would it look like?
That question requires no technical knowledge of AI. But the answer is, precisely, your AI strategy. The rest — which tool, which vendor, which architecture — are implementation decisions a good technology partner can help resolve.
The useful conversation isn’t about AI. It’s about what you want to achieve with your company.
The full interview with Patricio Artiagoitía in El Dínamo is available here →, and includes his analysis of the pace of AI adoption, the case of the municipality of Renca, and why he believes that within two years the competitive standings of companies, governments and countries will be reshuffled.
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