According to McKinsey, most organisations today score under 30 out of 100 on operational excellence. The biggest culprit? Zero visibility into what’s actually happening inside their own business operation.
Everyone wants to bring in AI. But if you’re implementing AI in the dark, it’s always going to end up a mess. That’s why 95% of companies are seeing zero ROI on their AI investments, despite billions spent.
I’ve had hundreds of conversations with B2B service leaders since the launch of ChatGPT, and it’s always the same story. Leaders don’t know how much work is getting done, who’s doing it, or how long it takes. You can’t fix a problem you can’t see, and you certainly can’t automate it without structured data into the processes you want to automate.
Nobody knows where the work is
Service businesses often know their outputs. They know how many invoices were closed, how many tickets were resolved, and how many clients were onboarded. What they can’t see is everything it took to get those results. The work itself is invisible.
There’s a massive gap between how leaders think work gets done and what’s actually happening. Process maps are full of neat swimlanes and arrows, but the reality is a mix of people and unpredictability. Work jumps between inboxes or sits idle while people wait for approvals, then gets lost when someone goes on holiday.
Take the manufacturing industry for instance. You’ve got a physical production line. Bottlenecks are impossible to miss. In services? The “production line” is spread across inboxes and spreadsheets, and, frankly, inside people’s heads. When we run solution methodology workshops, we often ask a simple question: “Why does this process work the way it does?” More often than not, the answer is, “We’ve never asked.” That tells you everything.
Emails and spreadsheets don’t cut it anymore
Inboxes and spreadsheets worked when teams were smaller, workloads were slimmer, and everything lived in one building. That’s no longer the world we live in. Unfortunately even in 2025, B2B businesses are still relying on these outdated tools to operate.
Individual mailboxes are black holes. Good luck tracking anything that lands in there, especially when you’re dealing with 30,000 emails a day. Spreadsheets don’t update automatically, and data gets stuck with the handful of people who can actually access it. Nobody knows what’s been picked up, what’s delayed, or what’s gone missing entirely. Work gets duplicated and priorities get lost. Accountability is nowhere to be found.
Let me put it plainly. If I asked you how many cases your Berlin team is working on right now versus your Bristol team, could you tell me? Most people can’t. You can’t make informed decisions about hiring, automation, or performance under these circumstances.
This lack of visibility doesn’t just affect internal efficiency, it’s customers who are hit the hardest. Urgent cases sit in the wrong queues while deadlines sail by unnoticed. Service quality tanks, because your teams can’t see what’s really happening.
Orchestration is the bedrock of decent service
The only way out of the mess, in my opinion, is orchestration. It’s the foundation of good service delivery. You bring your people, systems, and processes together under one roof. Everyone can see the work, who’s on it, and where it’s stuck. This isn’t an overnight fix, real change never is. Teams have to shift how they think, not just how they work.
Think of orchestration like a musical orchestra. Everyone has to play their part at the right moment to create harmony. That’s exactly what orchestration technology does for business operations, it gives you a view of every moving part.
When it comes to adopting any technology, I like to think back to when GPS first arrived. People didn’t trust a talking map initially, but in today’s world if your cab driver whipped out a UK road map atlas today, you’d lose patience pretty quickly. Orchestration is at the same tipping point, and it’s the only logical path to automation.
Get your house in order, then deploy AI
Everyone’s in a rush to get AI into their workflows. I get it, there’s pressure from the top to keep up. But the truth is, AI isn’t magic. It won’t fix bad operations. Introduce AI into a web of spreadsheets and disparate systems, and you’ll just scale the confusion.
AI needs structure. It needs clean data and clear workflows. You get that from orchestration. Once you can see where work slows down or relies too heavily on manual effort, you’ll know where AI can actually make a difference. Otherwise, you just end up automating what your noisiest colleague thinks should be automated, rather than where it will genuinely save time and slash costs.
This is where the 5% of businesses winning with AI ROI are pulling ahead. They got their house in order first. They mapped their processes, found the bottlenecks, and fixed the gaps. They created a repeatable, consistent way of working, then they automated.
Turn the lights on in your operation
Most organisations are still fumbling around in the dark. But that 5% of AI ROI winners started with visibility. Orchestration gives you just that, and it’s the new gold standard.
