Extract from Sam Davidoff’s article, “Stop Buying and Start Mapping: How to Make the Right Tech Investments.”
Firms that buy first and ask questions later get a fraction of the value. Firms that diagnose first capture nearly all of it.
Here is what is happening at law firms across the country. Clients are demanding that law firms use AI to bring down costs. The law firms respond by increasing their technology budgets and dedicating personnel to improve the use of AI across practice areas.
Those teams then research and sit through demos of dozens and dozens of AI products and decide which ones to pilot. At the end of the pilots, they pick one or two products to roll out firmwide, often based more on what they see peer firms doing than on internal analysis.
Is this the right way to capture the value from technology investment?
It’s clearly not, and you don’t need to take my word for it. McKinsey recently surveyed nearly 2,000 organizations across every major industry to answer precisely the question: how do organizations best capture value from new technology? It tested roughly thirty possible answers including bigger budgets, better models, stronger governance, more training, deeper talent benches, and executive engagement.
