Building tools inside our own company

One of the reasons I joined SeventyOne Consulting was that I was invited to help build the company, alongside doing client work. This autumn that has become very concrete.

We now have a small internal lab where any of us can build tools for how we work, and I've been spending a fair amount of time there. The most recent one was in use by my colleagues a few hours after I started on it.

The building itself went quickly with AI. What took real thought was deciding what the tool should stay away from, and which parts of the work should stay with people. Most of the other design choices followed from that.

Doing this inside our own company has changed how I listen when I talk with product and digital leaders. When it's this cheap to try something, the expensive part becomes deciding what deserves to be built at all. Much of how organisations plan and write business cases was designed for a time when delivery was slow and costly, and that is often where AI initiatives get stuck, somewhere between the pilot and real business value.

I really appreciate working somewhere that lets me test ideas like this on our own business before bringing them to clients. It's also the work I want to do more of: helping organisations find where AI creates real business value, and helping their teams get confident making those decisions themselves.

I'll soon be open for new assignments through SeventyOne Consulting. If that sounds like something your organisation is working on, I'd be glad to talk.