Eversund | Where ideas connect

Article

Gartner’s planning summit: are we automating decisions or ignoring choices?

By: Richard Lloyd | 14 min read

I was delighted to be going to a Gartner conference about decisions. I have been thinking and writing about decisions for the last two or three years, and here they were on the main stage. The funny thing is that somewhere in the two days I realised that the idea needs refining. When is a decision a decision, and when is it a choice? Once you look at the motivations behind a decision, it stops being a piece of analysis and starts to be, among other things, an expression of values. So this article has to start with a definition.

Article

SSOT vs. SVOT: The critical difference companies get wrong

By: Suhas Sreedhar and Peter Nilsson | 8 min read

How do you establish and maintain a single version of truth across our enterprise and our suppliers when the underlying systems, ownership, and data change? That question tends to reveal much more about whether you’re buying a system of record versus a functioning network.

Article

AI won’t replace your sales team. It will replace your sales process.

By: Eversund | 5 min read

There’s a lot of speculation about AI replacing salespeople, but I’m not sure the selling part of the job is what we should be most worried about. The average salesperson does a lot more than sell. Let’s break down what a salesperson actually does: research, prospecting, qualification, CRM updates, proposals, follow-up, forecasting, negotiation, relationship-building. Then, somewhere in between all of that, they actually have to sell.

Article

The 8 numbers that explain what’s really happening with AI adoption

By: Eversund | 11 min read

There is no shortage of evidence that companies are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI). Every quarter brings another survey showing that more organizations are experimenting with generative AI, putting models into production, giving employees access to copilots, or increasing their spending on the technology. At the same time, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the economic impact of all this activity remains much less significant than the level of investment would imply. Both observations can be true, and when the numbers are put side by side, the apparent contradiction becomes easier to understand. Therefore, a more useful way to think about the current state of enterprise AI is not to ask whether companies are adopting it. They clearly are. The more important question is whether companies are changing their operations quickly enough to turn widespread access to AI into any meaningful business outcomes.

Article

Don’t blame the supply chain. Look at decision speed.

By: Paige Turner | 4 min read

Over the last few years, “it’s a supply chain issue” has become the standard answer for almost everything. Delays, shortages, missed timelines. It’s become the default explanation. And in some cases, it’s absolutely true. But I think we’ve started using it a bit too freely, almost as a way of not looking any closer at what’s actually going on.

AI lets you do more, but do you know what’s worth doing?

By: Peter Nilsson | 6 min read

There are many versions of the genie-in-a-bottle story, but they’re all basically a giant thought experiment about power, unintended consequences, greed, and the fact that getting exactly what you ask for is often not the same as getting what you actually want. But in most of those stories, the hardest part isn’t getting the genie to grant the wish. It’s knowing what to ask for. We’re pretty good at knowing what we don’t have, and what we wish were different. We’re not nearly as good at figuring out what we actually want when the usual limits are taken away. More importantly, we're not very good at anticipating what new problems appear once one hurdle has been removed. The genie was never really the interesting part. The interesting part was what happened to us when the genie showed up.

Article

9 AI-Native Supply Chain Planning trends reshaping the industry

By: Alex Pradhan | 5 min read

AI-native supply chain planning is becoming a more visible part of the technology landscape. Over the past year, Alex Pradhan has spoken with a growing number of newer supply chain planning vendors and identified a number of characteristics and trends that distinguish AI-native platforms from traditional systems being retrofitted with AI.

Article

Data quality isn’t the answer either. So what is?

By: Avery Source | 5 min read

There seems to be a bit of a sobering up going on in the B2B technology space, where software vendors are increasingly changing their narrative to say that data quality is what really matters. After several years of telling us what AI could do, we're now being reminded that AI will only work as well as the data behind it. And while it is indeed true that AI will work much better with clean, quality data, I think that too is an oversimplification and, more importantly, not what anyone is actually looking for. The problem is that we skipped ahead one step. We became so focused on what AI could deliver that we forgot about the data required to make it work. But even if we now take a step back, clean up our data, make it accessible, and then go full force on AI again, we still haven't necessarily solved anything worth solving. We've simply improved one of the things that can help us solve the actual problem.

Article

Is your product actually a solution, or is it a platform?

By: Avery Source | 4 min read

The software industry loves labels. Product. Solution. Platform. Network. Offering. They're often used interchangeably, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing. There isn't a universally accepted definition for these terms, but there are some widely accepted perspectives in the software industry worth taking into consideration when you develop your go-to-market messaging. More importantly, using the right terminology helps set the right expectations with your customers.

Article

Is freight cost really the problem? Understanding logistics cost overruns.

By: Mark Cosway | 3 min read

Many logistics cost overruns aren't caused by logistics. They're caused by planning decisions. Yet when freight spend spikes, the first place executives look is transportation, which is the wrong target. Consider a company that sees an opportunity to sell more of its higher-margin products. The business shifts its product mix, but the parts needed to make those products aren't available where they're needed. The result is expedited shipments and airfreight, and suddenly the logistics department has blown through its budget. But did logistics actually cause the problem, or did a business decision simply create a logistics consequence?