A chat assistant licence for everyone is a reasonable first step. The problem is that it feels like a last one.
It usually goes like this: somebody on the leadership team gets asked what the company is doing about AI. Within a month, everyone has a licence, there is a short email about not pasting in customer data, and the question goes away. Here is what the licence does, and the four things it leaves exactly where they were.
What it does
It makes individuals a little faster at individual tasks. Drafting, summarizing, rewording, first-pass research. That is worth having, and staff who were already doing it in private are now doing it with the company’s blessing and a slightly better tool.
What it leaves undone
The process. The customer still waits three days for a quote because the quote needs a spreadsheet, a signature and a person who is on holiday. The assistant helped draft the email that says so. Every hand-off, approval and re-keying step in the business is untouched, and those are where the time goes.
The data. The value of AI in a business is what it can do with the company’s own information: the ticket history, the customer records, the quotes that won and the ones that did not. A general assistant has none of it. And the day someone pastes a customer list into one to “just get a summary”, the company has a data-handling incident it never planned for.
The measurement. There is no baseline, no target, and no way to tell the board anything except the number of licences. Was that an hour a week saved, or an hour a week spent asking the assistant to do things it cannot? Nobody knows, because nobody decided what to look for.
The rules. Staff who experiment will keep experimenting, with whichever tool they prefer, on whichever data is to hand. That is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when the company has no answer to “what are we allowed to do with this”, so every person writes their own.
What a strategy looks like instead
A strategy answers three questions the licence does not:
- Where in this business would AI or better software save real time or money?
- In what order should we do those things?
- What are the rules while we do?
A company of ten to two hundred people can answer all three in a few weeks of part-time attention. The answers usually rank a boring workflow fix above anything with “AI” in the name, and that is fine. The point was never the tool.
Keep the licences. Just stop calling them the plan.