People ask for AI but what they really need is automation, says Make CEO

It turns out that many people mistakenly view AI as an all-powerful ‘Magic Box’.

This was the surprising lesson Make CEO Fabian Veit shared with me during our recent interview at the company’s ‘Waves’ event in Munich:

Everybody asks, ‘how do I get AI into my business?’ But when you dig into it what many of them really mean is ‘how do I use this Magic Box to solve all my process pains?’

In Veit’s telling, when faced with messy data, processes they don’t understand, and technology that baffles them, many companies seem to believe that AI is the Magic Box that can ‘figure it all out’ — automatically navigating the organizational mess to make everything work perfectly without anyone from the executive having to lift a finger.

Sitting in the land of Goethe, this put me in mind of his cautionary tale, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ — in ...