Four and a half thousand years ago, people built this. No artificial intelligence. No cloud. No dashboards. No data platforms. No automation. Just people, resources, and an extraordinary objective.
Standing in front of it, I kept thinking about something that has nothing to do with ancient Egypt and everything to do with how we are approaching AI today.
The value isn't in the tool. The value is in what the tool allows people to do.
I think we are forgetting that. Right now, organisations are buying AI faster than they are creating value from it. They are buying platforms. Building data environments. Running pilots. Hiring specialists.
And yet in many of those same organisations, some of the most expensive people in the business are still spending Monday morning looking for information. Searching through reports. Opening spreadsheets. Chasing analysts. Waiting for answers. Trying to work out what changed before they can decide what to do about it.
Think about the absurdity of that. We have more intelligence available to us than any generation in history, and we are still making people go looking for it.
A better question
I have spent more than twenty years transforming businesses, across four continents, and I built and scaled the Automation and AI Centre of Excellence at a multi-billion dollar organisation. One thing has become very clear to me.
The question isn't where can we use AI?
The better question is: where are our best people losing capacity? Where are they spending time searching? Where are they waiting? Where are they doing work a machine could do? Where are they making decisions without the intelligence they need?
That is where AI belongs.
Beatrice's Monday morning
We worked with a major retailer with sixty category managers. One of them — I'll call her Beatrice — started every Monday the same way. Coffee. Laptop. Best intentions. And then three to five hours hunting through reports, finding the numbers, looking for anomalies, chasing answers, asking analysts for information. By the time she had what she needed, half her day was gone.
Beatrice wasn't hired to search. She was hired to decide.
So we built two agents. The first prepared a personalised performance briefing for every manager, every Monday morning — not another generic report, but their portfolio, their numbers, their exceptions, their priorities. The second could answer commercial questions inside the workflow they already used.
We didn't ask them to learn another platform. We didn't ask them to spend weeks in training. We brought the intelligence to them.
The result was more than 240 hours of capacity recovered every week. But even that isn't the part of the story I care about most. It is what happened on Monday morning. Beatrice opened her laptop and the information was already there. She didn't spend the morning searching. She started the morning deciding.
The uncomfortable truth
That is the real promise of AI. Not more technology. Not more dashboards. Not more pilots. More human capacity, better decisions, and measurable business value.
Which is how we think about implementation: start with the work. Find where valuable people are losing time, attention or decision quality. Identify the intelligence they need. Put AI into the workflow. Measure what changes. Then scale what works.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth. You probably don't have an AI technology problem. You may have an execution problem. You may have an ownership problem. You may have an operating problem. Or you may simply be trying to make AI fit your organisation, instead of making AI fit the work.
The winners over the next few years won't be the companies with the most AI tools. They will be the companies that get exceptionally good at one thing: putting intelligence in the hands of the right people, at the right moment, inside the work itself.
What lasts
Thousands of years ago, people came together in that place and built something extraordinary with the resources they had. We don't need to romanticise the tools they used. The remarkable thing is what they accomplished with them.
Technology will keep changing. The models will get better. The platforms will change. The tools we use five years from now may be almost unrecognisable. But one principle won't change.
Give people the capability to do their best work. Give them the intelligence they need. Give them their time back. And watch what they build.