For as long as I can remember, “transformation” has been something companies buy. They hire a consulting firm, spend a few million dollars if they are lucky, sit through months of workshops and discovery sessions, and at the end of it they get a PowerPoint deck, some renamed departments, and maybe a new tool nobody asked for. Everyone feels “transformed” for about a quarter, then it’s back to business as usual.
That model is dying. Not because consulting is useless, but because the nature of the work is changing. The people closest to the problems are getting access to the tools that can actually solve them. And that changes who transformation belongs to.
The first question I ask when I look at a process is always some version of “why is a person doing this?”
I’ve spent most of my career automating repetitive work. It’s been the through line in almost everything I’ve done, whether I was managing servers, supporting customers, closing deals, or helping clients figure out what to do with AI. The first question I ask when I look at a process is always some version of “why is a person doing this?” Most of the time, the honest answer is “because nobody has bothered to fix it yet.” That’s not a damning indictment of the people doing the work. It’s just how organizations drift when nobody is actively pushing against the drift.
What it actually looks like
Think about what most people’s days actually look like. You spend a chunk of your morning sorting through emails, flagging things, forwarding information to the right people. You copy data between systems that don’t talk to each other. You build reports by pulling numbers from three different tools and assembling them in a slide deck. You do this every week. Sometimes every day. And at some point you stopped questioning it because that’s just “the job.”
But it doesn’t have to be. The people who are going to do well in the next decade aren’t the ones who get faster at the manual work. They’re the ones who look at their day and start asking where a computer should be doing the work instead of them. Not so they can slack off, but so they can spend their time on the parts that actually need a human brain. Strategy. Judgment calls. Creative problem solving. The stuff they were supposedly hired for in the first place but never have time to do because they’re buried in process.
The people I see doing this well aren’t waiting for permission or a transformation initiative. They’re just quietly looking at their own processes, finding the spots where a computer should be doing the work, and fixing it themselves. That’s what transformation actually looks like when it’s not a line item on a consulting SOW.