I want to describe the feeling of watching a well-resourced AI implementation make your commercial problems faster without making them smaller, because I think it is more common than anyone is publicly admitting right now.
The personalisation engine is live. The automated campaign generation is running. The AI-assisted content is scaling. And the underlying conversion rate, the retention metric, the CAC trend, are all sitting in roughly the same place they were before the implementation, only now they are sitting there faster and with more data attached to them.
Speed amplifies. It does not fix. An attribution model that was generating a slightly distorted picture of commercial performance is now generating that distortion at scale and with more confidence. A handoff between marketing and product that was costing conversion at two touchpoints is now costing it at six. The commercial system that was misaligned before the AI touched it is misaligned faster now that it has.
The CMO who understood this before the implementation is in a different position to the one who is explaining it to the board six months after the budget was approved.
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