The meeting that AI canceled

Before automation, that decision went through a slow process. Different departments had to sit down together to discuss criteria, justify interpretations, and negotiate what counted as success. There was conflict, there were delays, and everyone complained.

AI came along and solved it: the decision became fast, consistent, and free of political friction.

But what looked like inefficiency had a hidden function.

That slow, conflict-ridden process was the only moment when sales, operations, product, and finance were forced to sit down and discover that they had completely different interpretations of what a good decision was. The conflict was the alignment mechanism.

With automation, the friction disappeared. The misalignment did not.

Each department started receiving the automated output and interpreting it by its own criteria, with no debate, with no exposure of the divergence. Execution became faster. And the problems started showing up later: already in operations, already at the customer, already in the numbers.

The real diagnosis is deeper: the company was never actually aligned. It just had a process that made the misalignment visible before it turned into damage.

AI did not create that misalignment. It merely removed the process that made it visible before execution.

This has a direct implication for anyone automating decisions right now: before removing the friction, it is worth asking whether that friction is doing some work that the automated process will not replace. Sometimes what looks like useless friction is the only real point of contact between departments that should be, but are not, aligned.

Tell me in the comments: does your company have a slow process that, deep down, was doing this alignment work? What happened when it was eliminated or automated?