The Enablement Illusion

In a couple of decades of shilling B2B software, there has been a persistent myth that the software enables the business user. Buy this doohickey, and you can get shit done without bothering the specialists in IT, the creative team, or the agency.

And of course, to a certain extent, that’s true; we aren’t sending handwritten notes to the typing pool or asking an analyst to translate a query about how many widgets we have in stock in Albuquerque into something the mainframe understands.

But if we look at, for example, who looks after our websites, it’s not the predicted enabled business users. It’s the same specialist web team, just with better tools and a different set of skills. Same with marketing automation, it drove the need for a different set of specialists: marketing operations.

Asking an executive to be “enabled” is really just asking them to do more work.

Yes, the vendor makes a big deal about how easy the tool is to use, and maybe the executive had a go at it once, but it still takes time and focus they don’t have.

In the same way, the website CMS didn’t turn CMOs into copy editors and page designers, CRMs didn’t turn CEOs into salespeople.

Although, of course, they could.

Today, at the peak of the AI hype cycle, we seem to be living in that ‘could’.

CMOs with a technical bent are posting about their latest experiments with Clay or vibe coding, creating a time-saving hack that a skilled marketing ops person should be wrangling, or sales leaders claiming they have automated the whole business development process.

The problem is that this isn’t just a challenge to the demarcation of who is doing what; leaders are making decisions about reducing headcount, and they sit there with the cash-catching mitt, waiting for the AI dividend to drop.

Which only really works when AI replaces expertise, not when, in reality, it either increases the return on expertise when it augments a specialist, or creates average work that nobody gives a shit about faster in the hands of an amateur.

We hold up the experiments we see on LinkedIn as what the future could be.

But I wonder if, when the AI dust settles, we’ll discover CMOs losing interest in how f’in’ hard data integration really is, or sales leaders realizing that scaling outbound with AI, though fun at first, is quite dull to maintain, when they’d rather be playing golf.

It’s just a thought.

Yes, AI is all cool shizzzle right now, but do business users really want to be enabled?

When the CFO says we can do more with less, someone still needs to do the do.

I might be being a bit Pollyanna about this, but if we can ride out this hype cycle, AI won’t replace expertise.

As a tool for specialists, it will make that expertise more valuable.