Speed is a vanity metric without a baseline
Xavier Vallée, Founder, Sapionic
Written as a reply to another post on LinkedIn.
Strong post. Especially the point about speed being a vanity metric without a baseline.
I see this constantly. Management teams presenting AI wins to the board with no documented pre-AI performance. It sounds impressive until someone in diligence asks: “compared to what?” If you can’t answer that, your entire ROI narrative falls apart.
I’d add one thing. The “pilot purgatory” problem isn’t just a change management failure. It’s a structural one. Most AI pilots are set up to prove the technology works. Not to prove it creates value. Those are two completely different questions. A pilot that demonstrates a model can summarise documents is interesting. A pilot that proves it reduces cost-to-serve by 20% is investable.
The companies breaking through right now aren’t the ones with the best models or the most AI headcount. They’re the ones who framed the problem in commercial terms from day one. Revenue. Margin. EBITDA. How to change the operating model to transform the business model. Then worked backwards to the technology.
That’s the divide. Not who adopted AI fastest. Who connected it to value fastest. Don’t repeat the mistakes you made with Digital Transformation!