The artificial intelligence boom has finally produced a clear success at fictional supplier Enterprise Tomorrow, which has sold an AI subscription to another AI company and immediately used the proceeds to buy one back.
After an Apollo analysis questioned the financial payoff outside technology, suppliers moved swiftly to reassure customers that the benefits were already visible on several very handsome charts belonging to suppliers.
“You cannot judge a transformation purely by whether the person paying for it has been transformed,” said an invented spokesman for Enterprise Tomorrow. “That is an extremely narrow view of the ecosystem.”
The company’s flagship platform promises to eliminate routine administrative work by creating a new category of administrative work called AI governance. Clients are invited to appoint a steering group, nominate champions and spend Tuesday deciding which routine tasks they might eliminate.
At fictional client Fallow & Sons, the pilot has already reduced the time required to write a weekly update from forty minutes to six. Checking the update takes an hour, though management expects this to improve once staff stop checking it.
The finance director asked when the savings would appear. Consultants recommended widening the pilot to include finance, ensuring that future questions about savings could be generated and answered by the same system.
A new dashboard now tracks adoption, engagement and enthusiasm. Profit remains on the old dashboard, which has been designated a legacy constraint.
The board was particularly impressed by a demonstration in which the software summarised a meeting nobody had needed to attend. It then identified seven action points, requiring a second meeting to establish who had agreed to them.
Enterprise Tomorrow insists customers should be patient. Railways, electricity and the internet also required investment before delivering returns, its spokesman noted, although he declined to say which historical revolution had charged per seat for a chatbot that invents the purchase order number.
Fallow & Sons has renewed for another year. Cancelling would mean admitting the first year was an experiment, and the organisation has already announced that it is a leader.
