His co-author Dave Wright, ServiceNow's Chief Innovation Officer, turns that into a question you can use in a planning meeting on Monday morning.

As you're debasing applying AI in this mode one fashion to optimize things, the real benefit you're going to get is not asking, how do I automate this workflow? It's asking, why should I automate this workflow? Because most of these workflows are being designed based on a constraint around the number of people you have to do the job.

When you're putting AI into something, you're going from being constrained by not having enough resource to having an abundance, potentially almost infinite resource.

So the question you should ask is, is this workflow designed to run in the AI age, or is this not just an opportunity to automate a workflow? Is this an opportunity to reinvent that workflow?

What you watch once the rules are in place.

Once you start to get those governance maps in place, that allows you to spot the exceptions.

So once you can start to understand the trend of how often an agent runs, if it normally runs 50 times an hour and suddenly it's running 8,000 times an hour, you've got a problem.

If you start to see a prompt length vary that never normally varies, then you might have a problem.

What's the first thing you look at to determine whether they're actually transforming or just automating?

I think the only thing funnier than that is when someone says, we're on a transformation journey for the next two years.

And you're like, oh, and then you finish, then it's all done.

No need to do anything after two years.

I think the interesting thing about transformation is it's got to be an ongoing process.

It never stops.

That's the nature of transformation.

So you have a, you have a cost cutting story and you have a growth story when you can start thinking differently about what's now possible that you couldn't do before without AI.

But what if we looked into thinking about AI in that moment beyond the why is what could we do differently? And Dave, I just wanted to set you up.

So this is, I mean, that's an interesting statement in itself.

Most of the conversations we have, Lauren, is when someone says what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, the question really is why are you going to do it? Because if you're, if you want to, let's use the call deflection example Brian gave, if you want to just deflect calls for the sake of it, then unless you're removing people from the organization, you're not getting any ROI on that.

You might be able to use it to improve customer satisfaction.

But what you really need to do is think about things a little bit differently.

And that's what IKEA did.

They looked at all their customer service calls, realized that a high percentage of them were questions around, will products fit? Will products go together? Will products look good in this room? So they decided that if they could develop an interior design capability, that might be something that customers wanted.

And I think that what I'm getting to is that if you want to look at the value that can be created from reanalyzing workflows and looking at how that can be enhanced, empowered with AI, are people even within an organization capable of and not necessarily capable is not the right word but are they innovative enough and you're the innovation experts we can see if that word is is appropriately fitting but are they innovative enough to really realize that if they take an iterative AI approach can they analyze what will have value in 2030 because I feel that that's still a real struggle for a lot of not even leadership, but middle management who are still analysing the workflows that they sit with in an organisation.