_____________________________________________________________________________________ Digital
Transformation
Business transformations have moved through a few distinct eras over the past 30 years, and until now, they all shared one thing in common: the unit of transformation was the process. With AI, that all changes.
Taking a step back, in the 1990s, reengineering efforts focused on end-to-end process optimization and rethinking how work flowed from start to finish to maximize efficiency. Enterprise Resource Planning( ERP) took those newly reengineered processes and automated them inside a single system. Digital transformation, starting in the mid- 2000s, re-invented processes and connected them externally, linking them to the cloud and mobile devices.
The focus has been on how processes ran, but we didn’ t directly address the human decisions or human intelligence needed in those end-to-end processes. AI breaks that pattern. For the first time, the unit of transformation isn’ t just the process. It now includes the decisions in and around the process. ERP never tried to capture judgment. The tools built for digital transformation didn’ t either. AI is different because it can enable the decision itself: surfacing options, flagging risk, recommending a path, sometimes making the call directly. ion
t came before. By Greg Pitstick
The decisions were never part of the system
Think about how manufacturing workflows were typically built. Someone mapped a process, automated the repeatable steps, and left the judgment calls in between entirely to people, such as when to expedite an order or how to weigh a quality flag against a shipping deadline. Those decisions were rarely documented because none of the tools built over the last three decades were designed to capture them. They simply lived in someone’ s head, built from years of experience.
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