Everybody's Going All-In on AI. Just Like They Did With Cloud. Remember How That Went?

We get it AI is sexy. It's on every leadership team's radar as a strategic imperative they've gotta leverage in the business.

But that mentality reminds me of the days when the hyperscalers — AWS, Azure, GCP — hit the market and every leadership team said the same thing: "We're going all in on cloud. Everything needs to be in the cloud." So IT leaders scrambled to figure out how to get all their apps up there. And once they did, the bill showed up and it was "holy crap, this is expensive now what?"

That shoot-first, aim-later approach is what's burned a lot of companies.

We think of it like building a house. Instead of hiring an architect to design the blueprints, you just start pouring concrete, framing walls, and laying brick. Then halfway through you realize the master bedroom's on the wrong side of the house and you forgot to plumb the bathroom.

That's the problem with this new AI gold rush. Companies are taking the same approach they did with the hyperscalers rushing into AI without stopping to ask the only question that matters first: what kind of house are we even trying to build, and what do we want it to have?

So before you go all in, get clear on what you're actually after. Are you trying to sharpen your business intelligence? Drive new revenue? Deliver better client service? Automate manual work? Tighten up your operations? Saying "we need AI" is like handing a builder a hammer and no blueprint. They'll build you something just don't be surprised when you get a barn instead of a home and the builder calls it "rustic."

In our experience, why AI projects fail usually comes down to one thing — there was never a plan. And a real plan answers two questions before a dollar gets spent. First: how is AI actually going to serve the business? And second, just as important: where does your data live, and is it clean and normalized enough to feed these models in the first place? That's the blueprint. Skip it, and you're not building the home your neighbors envy. You're just pouring concrete and hoping.