Somewhere between the ninth AI announcement and the third digital transformation initiative for the quarter, a curious feeling tends to creep over the modern executive. It's not quite dread, but close—something like the sensation one gets when the waiter flamboyantly sets fire to the dessert and only then asks, "did anyone order this?"
This is the feeling of blind investment. A moment in organisational history where otherwise intelligent people—some of them in very well-tailored suits—hurl resources at technology not out of conviction, but from the distinct terror of being left behind. It is as though the Enlightenment never happened, and the boardroom is now a séance: "Are you there, ROI? It's me, Chad from Product Strategy."
Take Klarna, the Swedish fintech firm that proudly went "AI-first" by announcing that their chatbot had replaced 700 people. A triumph of modern technology over dark age business practices, until said bot turned out to be less charming and significantly less useful than the average flatpack furniture instruction manual. Klarna's CEO, until recently serenading the stakeholders with unblinking faith in automation, is now hiring people again. "Lower quality", he confessed to Bloomberg, presumably while rearranging the org structure with the same confidence as a steward moving deck chairs on the Titanic. "It's critical to ensure customers can always talk to a person." A human in customer support—revolutionary!
And yet, Klarna is no anomaly. It is the prototype an alarming number of businesses are trying to ape. According to IBM's 2024 CEO Study, "2 out of 3 CEOs are acting without a clear view of how to help their workforce with the disruption and inevitable transitions AI will bring." And "fewer than one in three CEOs have assessed the potential impact of generative AI on their workforce." One imagines them tossing budget allocations into the abyss and hoping the abyss returns with a chatbot capable of resolving a billing dispute rather than misquoting Nietzsche.
The real marvel isn't that these ventures underperform—it's that anyone is surprised when they do.
The late Roger Scruton (1944–2020), in his reflections on culture and tradition, was astute in observing that imitation without understanding leads to cultural incoherence. The same can be said of the approach that many boards and executives are taking to investment in AI—investment without understanding leads to strategic incoherence. In many ways, this is worse than when a strategy is a platitude.
