Your AI strategy may be making a bad process faster

Friday!!! Thanks for spending another week with Still Monday. Keep voting, replying, and forwarding it to the person currently adding AI to a process nobody has questioned since 2017.

Today’s business lesson is simple.

If a workflow contains fourteen unnecessary steps, AI can make Step 4 extremely impressive.

You still have thirteen unnecessary steps.

Let’s get to work.

Enterprise AI adoption looks enormous until you ask what the AI is actually doing.

ServiceNow’s 2026 Enterprise AI Maturity Index found that nearly 60% of enterprises are using agentic AI.

That sounds transformational.

But only 9% are using agentic AI to create autonomous multistep workflows. Another 9% are using AI to create completely new workflows that were not possible before.

Most organizations remain much closer to:

Take existing process.

Add AI.

Continue existing process.

The underlying problem is visible in another number.

Only 16% of organizations said they had streamlined and integrated workflows across business functions using AI, down from 30% the previous year.

Companies are buying intelligence faster than they are redesigning work.

HPE’s chief people officer Stacy Dillow described the problem recently at Fortune’s AIQ Summit. Her argument was essentially that putting AI into the same old process without changing how the work happens will not produce a fundamentally different result.

This is where owners can waste extraordinary amounts of money while still producing successful demos.

Imagine a purchase-order process.

An employee enters information.

Manager approves.

Finance reviews.

Information gets copied to another system.

Procurement checks it.

Someone notices something is missing.

It goes back.

AI arrives.

Excellent news: The first form now fills itself.

The seven-day process takes six days and 23 hours.

Technology worked.

Business barely noticed.

Real productivity often comes from removing steps before automating them.

Why does this approval exist?

Why do two systems need the same information?

Why does a human copy something another system already knows?

Why are five people touching a decision one person could make?

Why does the process begin with a document instead of an event?

Palo Alto Networks offers a more interesting example. Its custom internal agent reportedly reduced IT tickets by 83% and now handles workflows across HR, finance and legal by letting employees retrieve answers directly rather than routing every request through a person.

The important part is not that they added a chatbot.

The flow of work changed.

An employee has a question, then gets an answer.

Several handoffs disappear.

That is where the value lives.

For small businesses, this is even more important because they have less money to waste on fashionable tools.

Before buying AI, map the process.

Remove the stupidity manually.

Then automate whatever survives.

AI is expensive.

So is bureaucracy.

Combining them should not be the strategy.

ServiceNow found 27% of organizations are currently using AI to automate and optimize workflows, but only 9% have reached autonomous multistep processes. ServiceNow

The robot is here.

It has been assigned data entry.

The share of surveyed organizations that said they had integrated workflows across business functions with AI fell from 30% in 2025 to 16% in 2026. ServiceNow attributes part of the problem to fragmented platforms and growing “agent sprawl.” ServiceNow

Apparently every department bought intelligence separately.

Executives at Fortune’s AIQ Summit repeatedly emphasized process redesign, governance and workforce change rather than simply deploying more tools. Fortune Live Media

The AI pilot went great. Now comes the company.

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Take one repetitive process and draw every handoff.

Mark every approval.

Mark every place information gets re-entered.

Mark every waiting period.

Then ask which steps would still exist if the process were being invented today.

Delete what you can.

Only then decide where AI belongs.

Automating waste preserves waste.

It just gives waste better software.

Suppose five people touch a transaction that only needs three.

The wasted cost is not just two people’s minutes.

It is waiting time, context switching, follow-up emails and delayed customer response.

Automation vendors naturally focus on what their tool can do.

Owners should focus on what the company can stop doing.

A deleted step has excellent uptime.

It also requires no subscription.

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17 steps.

14 approvals.

9 days.

NEW AI PROCESS

17 steps.

14 approvals.

8 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes.

CEO: Incredible.

OPERATIONS: We saved one minute.

CEO: Scale it.

Because it can make almost any individual task faster, organizations can feel productive without improving the complete system.

The customer does not care that Step 6 became 80% faster.

They care how long it took to get the answer.

Measure the journey.

Not the demo.

Vote below and tell us the process in your company most desperately in need of deletion before automation.

And send this to whoever owns your AI strategy.

Preferably before they automate the forwarding of this email.

Technically Friday. Emotionally awaiting approval 11 of 14.

— The Still Monday Desk