#98 Rob Broadhead: AI Implementation Starts With Business Process Improvement

Leadership teams across nearly every industry are moving quickly on AI implementation, and while the tools and models seemingly perform well, many rollouts stall at the handoffs and decision points that nobody took ownership of beforehand. Those gaps tend to surface the moment the technology begins moving work faster than the organization was built to handle. In this episode of DissedMedia: A Startup Story, I sit down with Rob Broadhead, founder of RB Consulting and a fractional CIO with more than 30 years of experience across companies ranging from startups to the Fortune 50. Together they talk through the idea that AI behaves as an accelerant, amplifying whatever an organization already does, the strong parts and the weak parts alike. Rob centers upon a point many leaders may overlook in their rush toward a solution; business process improvement usually has to come first, because defining the real problem, including its exceptions and the places where employees quietly fix things by hand, can determine whether an AI implementation pays off or simply moves a company faster toward its true bottlenecks. Rob explains how he uses a string of repeated why questions to push past surface requests such as "we need a CRM." He also describes how he earns the trust of frontline employees who may be guarding process knowledge that the executive team has never seen, an approach that tends to soften even the blockers who seem most resistant at the outset. When a client wants results before the discovery work is finished, he looks for a smaller, painful problem that can produce a quick win, much the way an emergency room physician treats the most urgent wound before anything else. The conversation also moves into the shadow spreadsheets and shadow AI tools that can appear wherever an organization has not supported its people well. Rob makes the case for keeping company context portable so that a business can switch between AI models as they leapfrog one another. Rob discusses why some companies that cut roles in favor of automation are now rehiring, often into positions that look different from the ones they eliminated. Rob also walks through his Decision Bottleneck Scan, an interview process that seemingly works best when it helps an executive put words to problems they already sense. For founders weighing whether to bring in outside help, his advice starts with trusting your gut; the clearer signal, however, may be a lack of clarity, particularly when nobody can name who is waiting on a bottleneck or who has the authority to move it. Connect with Rob Broadhead Website: https://rb-sns.com Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: Rob Broadhead and the RB Consulting company page, home of the weekly Inside the Process series and weekday five-minute AI tips Ben's book, 10 Topics To Help Managers, Leaders, and Entrepreneurs Get Better @ What You Do: https://amzn.to/4uDUC7K Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DissedMedia?sub_confirmation=1 More from Ben: dissedmedia.com | rostr.studio | benolmos.com