Impressive Demos are Easy. Useful AI is Not.
Your CFO just sat through another AI demo. It was impressive. The system answered complex questions in plain English. Charts updated in real time. The examples were flawless. Everyone nodded.
Three months later, that same CFO is still manually checking spreadsheets every Monday morning because the AI can’t decide which “revenue” number to trust.
The demo worked perfectly. The actual AI implementation didn’t. Nobody uses it.
Somewhere else in the organization, someone in operations just spent twenty minutes reformatting data that should have transferred automatically. Again. For the third time this week. That gap never shows up in the demo.
Why Demos Lie
Most AI pitches follow the same pattern. Clean sample data. Perfect definitions. No duplicates. No missing fields. No legacy records from a system migration five years ago that nobody ever cleaned up.
But your business runs on edge cases.
Systems disagree. Definitions evolved. Fiscal calendars don’t line up. Customer records stretch back longer than anyone remembers. And half the rules that matter live in someone’s head, not in a database.
AI works beautifully until it hits that reality. Then it doesn’t know which “closed deal” counts. It doesn’t know how to handle transactions that span fiscal years. It chokes on years of workarounds and exceptions.
The vendor says it’ll be fine. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they know better and sell it anyway. Either way, your team quietly goes back to the old workflow, now irritated because they were promised this would be fixed.
What Actually Helps
Finance doesn’t need AI that impresses executives. They need month end close to stop eating six hours of their life.
Right now, three systems that should agree don’t. Every month, the team exports data, pastes it into a master spreadsheet, manually checks discrepancies, fixes formatting, and reruns calculations. It’s not complex work. It’s just constant.
AI that delivers value wouldn’t replace the finance team. It would understand how those systems define transactions differently. It would reconcile them automatically, flag the issues the team normally catches by hand, and apply consistent formatting without being asked.
That’s high ROI AI implementation. Not because it’s revolutionary, but because Finance gets their time back and the books close faster.
But that kind of AI requires something most vendors skip. It requires understanding how the work actually happens. The systems involved. Where the exceptions live and why they exist. It requires a semantic model that reflects your business logic, not generic definitions of revenue, customer, or transaction.
Build that foundation and boring AI becomes possible. Skip it and you get impressive demos no one relies on.
The New Platform Problem
Your sales team already has a complicated relationship with the CRM. They use it because they have to. They’ve built side spreadsheets for what it doesn’t handle well. They know which fields to ignore because they’re never accurate.
Now imagine asking them to adopt an AI tool that lives somewhere else. Another interface. Another login. Another place to check.
Even if it’s better, they’re not switching. They’ve got quota to hit. AI that gets adopted doesn’t add platforms. It makes existing tools less annoying.
The CRM they already use starts ranking leads better. The reports they already trust catch errors earlier. The searches they already run return cleaner answers. The workflow doesn’t change. It just improves.
That kind of integration is harder than building a standalone AI product. It requires understanding how people actually work. Most vendors don’t want to do that. They sell a platform and make adoption your problem, then act surprised when it fails.
The Everything Problem
The lead in operations was sold an AI solution that would “transform the entire supply chain.” Eight months later, it’s still not live. Data sources are still being connected. Configurations are still in progress. Training is still ongoing.
What Marcus needed was simpler. His team was spending hours every week manually checking inventory across three warehouses because the systems didn’t sync. That problem could have been solved in two weeks.
Instead, he bought something too big to finish.
High value AI doesn’t start by transforming everything. It starts by fixing one real problem, then another, then another. Each small enough to finish. Each valuable on its own. That’s how ROI compounds.
The AI Implementation Questions Worth Asking
The next time someone demos AI, ask questions that make the room uncomfortable.
Show me this with our data, not your sample data. What happens with duplicates? Inconsistent dates? Transactions that span fiscal years? Good AI anticipates those questions. Bad AI hopes you don’t ask them.
Ask whether your team uses this inside the tools they already work in or whether it requires a new system. If it’s a new system, adoption will be a fight. Ask what the smallest version of this looks like that still delivers value. If they can’t answer, they’re planning to sell you everything and deliver nothing useful for months.
How This Works with P3
We don’t start with a list of what AI can do. We start with what’s annoying you.
The manual task your team still does every week. The error that keeps slipping through. The question that takes two days to answer when it should take two minutes. We pick one.
Then we build the foundation that the solution needs. Definitions. Logic. Exceptions. Reality. We build something focused that works inside the tools your team already uses.
In two weeks, it either delivers value or you walk away. No long contracts. No sunk costs. Just results or you’re done.
Over time, those wins add up. Operations get smoother. Manual work disappears. Decisions get faster. None of it looks like the demos. All of it makes the business better.
The most valuable AI implementation doesn’t announce itself with fanfare and branded swag. It just makes Tuesday morning less frustrating than it used to be.
If you want to skip the show and fix something real, Schedule a call now.
Get in touch with a P3 team member