The Workflow You Should Have Burned

The AI product that works is the one you should worry about.

The AI product that works is the one you should worry about. It speeds up the work you do today, shows a return on day one, asks nothing of you, and quietly removes the one thing that would have made you rebuild the work properly. The bill comes later, from a direction you are not watching.

Most of what is being sold to commercial real estate under the AI banner is the same job you already do, done faster. Abstract the lease, but quicker. Reconcile the service charge, but in seconds. Produce the variance pack, but overnight. It sells beautifully, because it slots into how you already work and you can see the saving immediately. And it is, I think, a trap with a very long fuse.

Start with what these products actually do. They take your existing workflow and compress its labour. The workflow itself is left untouched. Nobody asks why you produce that deliverable in that shape, or what the work would look like if you rebuilt it around what the machine can now do. The tool points itself at the artefact you already make and makes it cheaper.

The trouble is that the artefact you already make is a fossil.

You abstract a hundred-page lease into a two-page structured summary because no human can hold a hundred-page lease in their head. That is the constraint the abstract was invented to solve. If the machine can hold the whole lease, and answer any question you put to it directly, the two-page abstract is a buggy-whip: a beautifully made solution to a problem you no longer have. Automating its production is automating the manufacture of something a redesigned workflow might not even want. You have made the horse faster instead of buying the car.

WHY THE GOOD VERSION OF THIS IS THE DANGEROUS ONE

Now, I am not going to tell you that selling the faster horse is a con. It is not. It is often the only sale that works.

Asking a real estate firm to redesign a workflow is asking it to admit the current process is wrong, restructure who does what, swallow the disruption, and trust a supplier with how the work is done rather than just a task. That sale loses to something more urgent every single budget cycle. The “do it with AI” sale wins precisely because it demands nothing: it fits your org chart, it fits your deliverable, it pays back on day one. For the firm selling it, leading with the faster horse is frequently the correct opening move. The question that matters is what happens after the sale.

And there are two firms that make the identical pitch.

One is using speed as a wedge. It lands on “we’ll automate your reporting”, gets inside, learns your workflows, and then uses that position to drive the redesign you would never have bought cold. The other is selling speed as the whole product: bank the saving, never move, sell the same faster horse to the next firm. From the outside, on a website, you cannot tell them apart. They say the same words. The only tell is whether the company has any theory of the rebuilt workflow it is taking you towards, or merely a longer and longer list of things it can speed up. Breadth, oddly, is the giveaway: a firm with a redesign in mind goes narrow and deep on one workflow, because you cannot rethink fifty at once. A firm selling faster horses adds a new horse every quarter.

THE BILL ARRIVES FROM A DIRECTION YOU ARE NOT WATCHING

The comforting assumption is that if you buy the faster horse, you will eventually notice it was the wrong purchase and correct course. I do not think you will. The faster horse is sticky for a cruel reason: it removes the very pain that would have forced you to rethink. The analyst hours that used to hurt, the late nights on the variance pack, the cost that might one day have made you stop and ask whether the whole process was wrong, all of it gets quietly absorbed by the tool. The pain that would have triggered the redesign is gone. So the redesign conversation never happens.

You run a fossilised workflow at ten times the speed, indefinitely. You feel faster, leaner, more modern than the firms around you, and for a good while you genuinely are. You will mistake the speed for transformation, because from the inside they feel the same.

Then one day a competitor who rebuilt the workflow rather than accelerating it does something you simply cannot do at any speed. Not faster reporting: a different capability altogether, one that only exists because they burned the old process and built around what the machine made possible. Your faster horse cannot catch their car, because the race has stopped being about speed. That is when the bill arrives. Years late, from a direction you were not watching, as a capability gap rather than a cost. The faster horse never failed you. That is exactly why it was dangerous. It served you faithfully while quietly foreclosing the thing that would have mattered.

WHAT TO DO WITH THIS BEFORE YOU SIGN

None of this is an argument against buying AI. It is an argument against buying speed on a workflow you should be rebuilding. The two feel identical at the point of purchase and could not be more different five years out.

So before you sign for the next “do X with AI”, ask one question that the demo will not answer for you: is X a workflow I should be redesigning, or merely accelerating? If the honest answer is that the whole process is a relic of constraints the machine has just removed, then speeding it up is the most expensive kind of progress there is, because it feels like winning and it quietly switches off the alarm that would have told you to do the real work.

The firms that win the next decade will be the ones who had the nerve to look at a workflow they had run for thirty years and ask whether it should exist at all. Speed is the consolation prize. The real prize goes to whoever is willing to burn the workflow and build the thing the machine actually makes possible.~

Faster horses are lovely. Just remember what happened to the people who kept breeding them.