AI in Automation, Engineering, and Education
Perhaps the real AI investment for businesses is deciding what NOT to automate.
Your AI pilot can “succeed” and still stall the business. It just makes the wrong work faster.
I saw this in a regional P&C insurer rolling out an LLM to speed up claim updates and a mobile claims app.
Week 3 looked great: adjusters were sending 30% more customer messages and the team closed 20% more internal tickets.
Month 2: cycle time did not move. Reopens went up. Supervisors spent Fridays rewriting language that sounded like coverage decisions, and legal flagged a few letters for escalation.
The model was fine. The problem definition was not. Nobody wrote down which decisions must stay consistent (coverage, liability, reserve changes), what evidence counts, and who owns the “we are not sure” path.
With 2026 starting as a prove-the-ROI year for AI and new tech laws kicking in, vague automation becomes an audit trail, not a learning loop.