Don't try to optimize your strongest departments with your first AI project. Instead, target 'layup roles'—areas where processes are broken or work isn't getting done. The bar for success is lower, making it easier to get a quick, impactful win.

Jumping into AI tools without a marketing strategy and documented workflows leads to noise and frustration, not efficiency. AI should be used to augment existing team members and up-level well-defined processes, not to automate a broken system.

Many companies rush to automate messy processes, which only locks in inefficiency. Instead, learn and refine the process by doing it manually first, as early Amazon and DoorDash did. Only automate once the system is optimized, using technology to speed up good systems, not paper over bad ones.

Rushing to adopt AI tools without a clear strategy and established workflows leads to chaos, not efficiency. AI should be the fourth step in a system, used to strategically uplevel your team and enhance proven processes, rather than just creating more noise or automating a broken system.

A critical error in AI integration is automating existing, often clunky, processes. Instead, companies should use AI as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink and redesign workflows from the ground up to achieve the desired outcome in a more efficient and customer-centric way.

Before implementing AI automation, you must validate and refine a process manually. Applying AI to a flawed system doesn't fix it; it just makes the system fail more efficiently and at a larger scale, wasting significant time and resources.

Don't assume AI can effectively perform a task that doesn't already have a well-defined standard operating procedure (SOP). The best use of AI is to infuse efficiency into individual steps of an existing, successful manual process, rather than expecting it to complete the entire process on its own.

Don't put AI on a broken process. Before applying AI, first map and optimize your current workflows. AI can't fix fundamental flaws like too many approvals or unnecessary handoffs; it can only accelerate an already efficient process.

Don't just plug AI into your current processes, as this often creates more complexity and inefficiency. The correct approach is to discard existing workflows and redesign them from the ground up, based on the new paradigms AI introduces, like skipping a product requirements document entirely.