Azeem Azhar

It is a combination of people issues, misalignment between leaders and those who are actually doing the work, misalignment in the incentive systems for how and why people should use these systems, and also all of the process issues because our internal processes have been designed around

assumptions of how fast the work can be done, how well it can be done, what kind of exceptions might happen at each stage.

And when you start to use a general purpose technology like AI as produced by large language models, well, all of those parameters start to break down and you have to think about an entire process redesign and a workflow redesign.

So the constraint isn't the availability of the tools.

I mean, we're all one click away from Claude Codex.

It's how much we can actually get done within the framework of the spaghetti that is legacy processes.

The point there being that firm productivity gains that you might see in a work group or within a few employees don't automatically scale.

You know, the story I used to tell about this, and I still do tell the story,

is that when electricity was rolling out at the turn of the 20th century, the very first car manufacturers who really were very artisanal, they worked in old carriage works, adopted electricity really quickly.

And what they did was they hung single pendant lights in their workshops to extend the working day.

But in order to really get the benefits of electricity and manufacturing, you had to build the moving assembly line system.

And that requires, in modern management consulting speak, and sorry for using this phrase,

process redesign.

So you are at this stage, we are at this stage where these productivity gains won't necessarily and for free scale across an organization.

When I talk to people who are building these systems, they just say that it's really hard to do.

Building an extensive agentic workflow that can do longer tasks safely isn't like doing a Google query.

As the tools become more agentic,

reliability becomes a real bottleneck, longer context as your experience when you use Claude or ChatGPT leads to some unreliability.

The models get, you know, less good.

If you've got a system that's more autonomous