Great AI is really boring but it is what will make you rich

When people think about AI, they think about all the exciting things, the twirling robots in car factories, the chatbots that can argue with you, the AI-generated music and art that feels almost magical. They think about AI replacing every job you can imagine, except perhaps the ones no one wants.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Great AI is really boring.

Not boring in the sense of unimportant, boring in the sense that it is not glamorous, it is not newsworthy and it won’t get you a viral video. Great AI doesn’t start with humanoid robots. It doesn’t start with futuristic offices that look like sci-fi film sets.

Great AI starts with process.

And process is dull.

It’s dull because it involves rolling up your sleeves and asking tedious questions about how work actually gets done. It means tracing your workflows, looking at every approval, every spreadsheet, every piece of manual re-entry that wastes time. It means sitting in rooms with the people who actually do the work and mapping reality rather than the fantasy you see on PowerPoint.

But that boring work is what will save your company.

Why process matters

Think about the organisations that run like clockwork. Amazon is not magical because of drones. It is magical because of process, the algorithms that decide what goes in which warehouse, the data that predicts your next purchase, the systems that mean a product can be picked, packed and on a lorry before you’ve closed your laptop.

Think about the supermarkets that survived the chaos of pandemic shopping. Tesco didn’t manage because they had the flashiest website. They managed because their logistics systems, underpinned by boring AI, could suddenly reroute entire delivery networks and rebalance supply when panic-buying stripped the shelves.

And think about your own company. How many hours are lost each week to rework, manual entry, and ‘just checking’ emails? Those inefficiencies aren’t solved by glamorous AI. They are solved by looking at workflows and automating the stuff no one enjoys doing anyway.

The companies that got it wrong

There are some spectacular failures that prove the point.

A major global bank poured millions into an AI-powered ‘virtual assistant’ for customer queries. The chatbot was slick, the marketing was glossy, but the underlying processes were broken, half the data it needed was in incompatible systems and the other half was missing entirely. The result? A confused bot that sent customers round in circles and a reputation disaster.

Another cautionary tale comes from a large retailer that rushed into AI-driven inventory management. They skipped the tedious work of cleaning their data and mapping workflows. The system reordered based on outdated information, leading to warehouses stacked with the wrong products and empty shelves where the essentials should have been.

These aren’t fringe mistakes. They are exactly what happens when leaders skip the boring process work and dive straight into ‘exciting AI’.

Where to start

You start in the dullest place imaginable.

You start with workflows.

Which means:

• following a customer order from start to finish and seeing every point where it slows down
• asking why the same data is typed into three different systems by three different people
• finding the approvals that take five days when they should take five minutes
• challenging the sacred cows, the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ steps that no one questions

This is the homework that no one wants to do. But it is the homework that transforms a business.

What great AI actually looks like

Great AI doesn’t make headlines. It doesn’t have a cute face or a dramatic demo.

It looks like an insurance company using machine learning to flag incomplete claims before they clog up the system.
It looks like a manufacturer using predictive analytics to schedule maintenance, so the production line never stops.
It looks like a law firm using AI to read and categorise thousands of contracts overnight, so its lawyers can actually think.

None of this is exciting to talk about in your next. But it is the kind of AI that makes companies efficient, low-cost and brutally competitive.

The Challenge for CEOs

If you are a CEO dreaming of AI glory, you have a choice.

You can chase the flashy demo, buy the expensive system, make the keynote speech about your ‘AI strategy’.  Job done. Then you wonder why nothing actually changes.

Or you can do the boring work that will change everything.

Walk your workflows. Map the pain points. Tear apart the processes that no one has questioned in years.

Because here’s the brutal truth: AI will not save you from bad process. In fact, it will amplify it.

But if you do the dull groundwork, AI will quietly make your company unstoppable.

The question is, do you have the courage to start with the boring stuff?