If you lead a business with 50 to 400 employees, you are currently being bombarded with a singular message: AI adoption is urgent. The implication is that if you aren’t “buying” Artificial Intelligence today, you’re already behind.
But here is the reality: Artificial Intelligence isn’t something you buy; it’s something you weave.
At Stringfellow, we see a dangerous trend emerging. Mid-market leaders are being pressured to treat Artificial Intelligence like a collection of “point solutions”: individual apps or add-ons bolted onto the side of the business. When treated as a software purchase, Artificial Intelligence produces incremental gains at best and expensive distractions at worst.
To see a material impact on your margins and scalability, you have to stop looking at Artificial Intelligence as a tool and start looking at it as an operating model decision.
The “Email” Reality Check
It is helpful to remember that technology follows a predictable adaptation path. Think about how long it took for email to become the “fabric” of your business.
In the beginning, usage was inconsistent. There were no policies, no “inbox zero” philosophies, and certainly no realization that it would eventually replace the memo and the phone call. It took years for organizations to adjust their processes and build the governance required for email to become foundational infrastructure.
AI is no different. We are currently in the “messy middle” of the adoption curve.
Beware the “1,000 Hour” FOMO
You’ve likely seen the headlines or heard the anecdotes at networking events: “I used Artificial Intelligence to write a process that saves my business 1,000 hours a year!”
While those stories make for great LinkedIn posts, they are currently the exception, not the rule. This narrative generates a massive amount of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), which leads many leaders to rush into failed initiatives.
The truth is that the majority of current Artificial Intelligence “point solutions” will fail to deliver a positive ROI. This isn’t a failure of the technology itself; it’s a natural part of the business cycle. Buying a writing assistant for marketing or a chatbot for the website creates activity, but it rarely creates strategic advantage.
Why Point Solutions Fail
Fragmentation is the enemy of ROI. Artificial Intelligence only produces durable results when it is integrated into three specific areas:
- Core Business Processes: How work actually gets done.
- Underlying Data Structures: The “fuel” the Artificial Intelligence needs to be accurate.
- Governance Controls: The guardrails that keep your data safe.
Without these three pillars, AI is just another subscription expense on your P&L.
A Structured Path to Value
For a growing $20M–$200M organization, the goal shouldn’t be “doing AI.” The goal should be improving operational efficiency, talent leverage, and decision speed.
At Stringfellow, we have a proven process to bring new technologies into our playbook. We don’t believe in “moving fast and breaking things” when it comes to our clients’ infrastructure. Instead, we focus on a suitable time horizon:
- Audit & Align: We tie Artificial Intelligence initiatives to executive-level business priorities, not just “cool” use cases.
- Redesign before Automate: We evaluate the workflow first. Automating a broken process just makes it fail faster.
- Phased Integration: We move at a pace aligned with your organizational readiness, not market noise.
The Bottom Line
Artificial Intelligence will reshape the mid-market over the next decade. However, the winners won’t be the companies that implemented the most tools. They will be the ones that integrated Artificial Intelligence intentionally and structurally into how they actually operate.
That distinction determines whether Artificial Intelligence becomes a line-item expense or a competitive advantage.
