One image. Four teams.
Product prepares it for the catalogue. Marketing prepares it for a campaign. Someone prepares it for the website. Sales has a version too, although nobody is entirely sure where that one came from.
Everyone has a deadline. Everyone does what’s needed.
Four competent people, fudging around with the same file.
Now give each of them an AI assistant.
Excellent. We can do this four times, faster.
Is that the answer?
Still?
Each team may have a perfectly sensible process. But look across the business. How much of the same work happens in several places, simply because each team has always looked after its own?
The image is a small example. Someone finds the original, checks which version is approved, removes the background, corrects the colour, and gives it a useful name.
Elsewhere, someone is doing that again.
Different uses will need different outputs. But a properly prepared source image could give everyone a better place to begin.
What could we do once, well, so everyone can use it?
Someone has to ask that question across the teams.
Someone who understands enough of their work to spot the connections, bring people together, and help establish a shared way forward. Give that person the access and authority to do it.
I think of that person as a node.
They know who needs the image, what each team needs from it, and what happens when it changes. With a capable assistant helping them prepare, organise, and route the work, they can look after more of those connections.
And perhaps other people become nodes around what they know and care about.
The designer has ideas that haven’t been possible to build. With AI helping with the code, those ideas can go further.
The marketer has a market to investigate. There might be time now that preparing the same image again is off the list.
Someone else has an extraordinary eye for what’s wrong. They know the product, catch the misleading detail, and ask whether we have permission to use the photograph in the first place. That judgment belongs in the process.
Creative direction. Market exploration. Oversight.
Human brains, doing work they care about, with very good assistance.
And the business gets to hire differently.
You need someone who understands markets. Must they also be proficient in the tool you happen to use for preparing images?
The designer brings an eye, ideas, and judgment. With help implementing those ideas, the range of what they can contribute grows.
Tool proficiency still has value. But it needn’t stand in for the expertise you actually wanted to hire.
If you don’t know that expertise is there, how will you know what to make room for?
You won’t discover it by counting how many files someone processes.
Ask what people notice. What they want to try. What they understand about the business beyond the task currently on their desks.
Then look at how those abilities could work together.
This takes thought as teams change around AI. Responsibilities need owners. Shared work needs somewhere to live. People need to know what they can decide, what the assistant can do, and when another human needs to be involved.
Otherwise, we’ll keep the same divisions and the same repeated effort, with a new subscription in each department.
There is a more interesting possibility here.
The person who loves design gets more room to design. The person curious about markets gets to investigate them. The person who understands how the pieces fit can help them fit.
We have people who want to contribute and tools that could help them reach further.
Why are we still arranging the work as though none of them can connect?