AI Made Your Workflow Faster, or Just Moved the Bottleneck?
Druss_ · reddit · 2026-09-17
A substantive discussion on enterprise AI adoption: AI speeds up individuals at every step, but the bottleneck often just moves. In a sales-proposal example, sales, finance, and ops each save time with AI, yet the proposal still sits in inboxes because handoffs didn't change — with fixed review capacity, more drafts just mean longer queues. The author proposes testing one workflow end-to-end (elapsed time, total human effort, rework, waiting), assigning clear ownership of the final result, letting AI handle info assembly and routine checks with exceptions escalated to decision-makers, and cutting handoffs that shouldn't exist. Key point: individual effort savings and process speed are separate gains; measuring one doesn't prove the other.
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