Implementing AI has a critical and often-overlooked problem that Raman Shah just reminded me of in another discussion: It can only learn what is documented.
When you teach an AI to perform a process in your organization, you train it on all the internal documents you have. But these describe the RAW – Rules As Written. They do not describe the RAU – Rules As Used.
It takes a lot of care to do process discovery properly. You need to have a human being interview the people doing the work to find out how business is actually done.
Work-to-rule is a classic form of industrial action where workers do exactly what they’re told in order to stop production without going on strike. If you train an AI on just your documents, you are asking it for a work-to-rule stoppage.
