The PC was heralded as revolutionary; it was going to save time, revolutionize our work… But it became an opportunity lost. Paper became digital files. Filing cabinets became shared drives. Memos became email. We sometimes worked faster. We did not necessarily work differently. And we certainly did not work more efficiently. The underlying logic: approval chains, reporting cycles, hierarchies and incentives remained intact. The internet and smartphones followed the same pattern, compressing time and distance. But neither forced enterprise changes. The tools changed. The organizational model did not. This stagnation is referred to as the Solow Productivity Paradox, a historic mismatch between massive technology investments and flat corporate productivity. And while the Internet boom did see a raise in productivity, it was due to investment in hardware, not so much due to a change in how we worked, as explained by Robert Gordon in The New Economy: What Productivity Miracle?

Full opinion : Slapping AI on top of a broken workflow won’t magically save you money — it just speeds up your existing operational mess.