Are you sprinkling "AI dust" on your product?
The expression is not mine. It comes from monday.com's own account of their AI transformation:
"We were building 'AI dust', sprinkling automations onto existing workflows without embedding them within or changing the product's fundamental value proposition."
Read that again. A B2B company with 250,000+ customers dedicated a full month to AI, shipped a wave of AI features, and concluded it had changed nothing fundamental. Their conclusion: "Adopting AI features is not the same as becoming an AI company."
AI dust is what most companies are buying right now. A copilot plugged into an unchanged process. An assistant summarizing meetings that are still just as useless. AI automations sprinkled on workflows that still run exactly as they did in 2023. It makes for great demos. But what impact on your bottom line, or your top line?
Here is McKinsey's conclusion: 88% of companies have adopted AI, but only those that deeply rethought their processes get a real impact on their operating profit. All the others are still struggling to see a return on investment.
The main difficulty in moving beyond these limits is not the technology. According to monday.com, it lies in moving from "how do we improve the current product with AI?" to "how do we rethink the current product for AI?". And that took longer than the technical work itself.
In short: the bottleneck is not the model, nor the tool. It is your mindset, your ways of working, and your ability to rethink your offer completely.
So before you approve your next token invoice, ask yourself one question: does this fundamentally change the way we work? Or are we just sprinkling our product and our processes with AI dust?
If this resonates, let's talk!