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ARTIFICIAL intelligence has quickly become a country, economy and boardroom priority. Across different organisations and industries, leaders are asking the same questions: which model should we use? Should we deploy ChatGPT or Claude? Do we need an AI strategy? Where should we begin? How quickly can we implement it? These are important questions. But I believe they overlook a more fundamental one: is our organisation actually ready to benefit from AI?
Over the last few months as I have been thinking about how AI is changing organisations, this question has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Many organisations are treating AI as a technology challenge when, in reality, it is exposing a much older management challenge. That challenge is how organisations manage information.
Most discussions assume that AI itself is the limiting factor. I suspect the opposite is true. For many organisations, particularly in developing economies like Pakistan, the limiting factor is the organisation itself.
Consider a manufacturing company operating several production lines. Every morning, the production manager decides which supervisors should run which lines, which maintenance engineers should be assigned to planned shutdowns, which operators should work overtime and how production should be adjusted if a machine unexpectedly fails. These decisions rely on dozens of variables: employee skills and certifications, attendance, maintenance history, machine capability, quality performance, customer delivery commitments, inventory levels and production priorities. An AI system could analyse all these variables simultaneously and recommend the allocation most likely to maximise output, minimise downtime and meet customer commitments.
