Stop Saying AI. Start Solving Something.

There was a piece in the Times this week that stuck with me. Julie Averill, who spent eight years running technology at Lululemon, wrote about what happened when she left the company. Her replacement got a new title. Chief AI and Technology Officer. And she said something that I haven’t been able to shake since I read it. The title costs nothing. It doesn’t produce anything either.

That’s the whole ballgame right there.

I’ve been sitting in rooms with founders and executives for years now, and I’ve watched this exact thing happen over and over. Somebody on the board asks what the AI strategy is. Somebody in the C-suite panics a little. And within a quarter there’s a press release, a new title, maybe a pilot program nobody asked for, and everybody gets to say they’re “doing AI.” Nothing about what problem it solves. Nothing about what it costs to run. Nothing about who’s accountable when the demo doesn’t turn into a working system six months later.

And look, I get why it happens. ChatGPT showed up and suddenly the technology was something a board member or an investor could actually understand and play with themselves. That’s rare. Most enterprise tech stays behind a wall of jargon that only the technical folks can really speak to. AI broke through that wall, and now everybody at the table has an opinion and a sense of urgency, whether or not they understand what’s actually involved in deploying it well. So you get demand from the top, demos that look incredible in a conference room, and a rush to announce before there’s a plan underneath the announcement.

Here’s the thing though. AI isn’t a strategy. It’s a tool. And a tool only matters in relation to the problem it’s solving. If you don’t have a real, specific, expensive problem that AI is uniquely suited to help with, bolting it onto your org chart doesn’t do anything except cost you money and, a lot of the time, cost people their jobs while you figure that out the hard way.

I think about this constantly in my own work. When I’m sitting down with a client or a company I’m looking to represent, the first question was never “are you using AI.” The first question is what’s actually broken. What’s slow. What’s expensive. What’s costing you customers or costing you people. If AI is the right tool for that specific problem, great, let’s build toward it with real context and a real return sitting at the end of the road. If it’s not the right tool, then it doesn’t matter how good the demo looked in that boardroom.

That’s the part companies keep skipping. Averill talked about how her team used AI at Lululemon to help predict which products would sell in which stores. That took real time, real people, real budget, and it was built around an actual business problem they were trying to solve. That’s a world away from slapping a chief AI officer title on somebody because the board wanted to see movement.

Posturing isn’t strategy. Announcing isn’t building. And chasing a technology because everybody else is chasing it isn’t the same thing as knowing why you need it.

If you’re a leader thinking through where AI actually fits in your business, start with the problem, not the acronym. Figure out what it’s costing you to not solve something, and then figure out if AI is genuinely the tool that closes that gap. Everything else is just noise dressed up as progress.