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At "The New National AI for All Strategy," an event presented by the Toronto B2B Marketing Community in Toronto, Qasim Naqvi, Partner at Strategy&, gave a masterclass called "The AI Gold Rush: Where Is the Value?" One exercise has stayed with me since.
He put two AI investments side by side.
Investment #1: 96% accurate, 90% adoption, 30% faster, cost unchanged.
Investment #2: 80% accurate, humans still handle 20% of cases, capacity up 15%, cost down 12%.
Then the question: which one would you pick?
Most of us reach for the first. It has the better score on almost everything. But look at what changed in the business. In the first, people are using a faster tool and the cost line hasn't moved. In the second, the firm can take on more work for less money.
The takeaway: technical success and investment success are not the same test. The better investment is the system that changes the business, not necessarily the model with the highest score.
That is an operations idea as much as an AI idea. A tool can be excellent and still change nothing, because the value only appears if the work around it changes too.
For small specialist firms, that's where most plans quietly fall apart. The tool is easy to buy. The workflow around it is the hard part, because nobody has written down how the work actually gets done. There is no baseline to measure against, no clear owner, and no way to tell whether people are relying on the new tool or working around it. You can't capture value from a process you can't describe.
That's why "fix the process first" isn't a delay tactic. It's what makes the investment measurable.
Try it with one tool you already pay for:
- Name the problem it was meant to solve, and put a number on it.
- Write down the baseline from before you started.
- Check what moved: time, capacity, cost, or error rate.
- If nothing moved, ask whether the workflow changed, or only the software.
If you can't do step two, that's your first project. Take the GRIC checkup for a quick read on where your operations stand, then send me a message and tell me what you found.
Ideas shared from Qasim Naqvi's "The AI Gold Rush: Where Is the Value?" masterclass at The New National AI for All Strategy, presented by the Toronto B2B Marketing Community and hosted by Layisha Paerhati of Ayanyol. Follow Qasim Naqvi on LinkedIn.
Related: "Culture You Can Score."