We're under immense pressure to adopt AI. We're buying tools, licensing copilots and training teams on prompt engineering. But in our rush to modernize, we are often taking our existing, convoluted, approval-heavy, siloed workflows - think of them as our corporate cow paths - and simply adding AI to them. The result is bad processes happening quickly. If you apply AI to a workflow riddled with friction, you get chaos faster than efficiency.
I see this daily in veterinary medicine, where high burnout rates cost the sector upwards of $2 billion per year. It's a challenging environment with long hours, stressful workloads and patients that can't even tell you what's wrong. But I've found that the best way to boost performance and even increase capacity with maxed-out teams is to address the underlying operational issues.