The Hidden Cost of Repetitive Tasks Is Numbing Your Competitive Edge

Most organizations are drowning in mundane processes that drain resources, frustrate employees, and create friction for customers. While executives focus on high-level strategy, the operational reality often involves teams spending 30-80% of their time on repetitive tasks that could be automated.

This operational drag is becoming existentially threatening as AI-powered competitors move faster and deliver better experiences.

In a recent SEF Backstage Pass Podcast interview, DeepOpinion's co-founding partner Ahmed Al-Ali revealed why automation is the new competitive battlefield. Here's what forward-thinking leaders need to know.

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The New Competitive Reality: Why General-Purpose AI Changes Everything

The market has shifted fundamentally. AI has become a general-purpose technology with transformative power similar to electricity, the internet, and microchips.

"Research shows that there are two interesting paradigms that are appearing... AI, and more specifically, generative AI, is a general purpose technology," explained Ahmed. "That means it's a foundational technology that allows innovation to be built on top of it, and accordingly create a more positive impact on the abundance of resources."

Unlike narrow technology innovations, general-purpose technologies create exponential value across industries by enabling:

• Dramatically lower operational costs through automated workflows
• Faster innovation cycles as small teams can accomplish more with less
• Better customer experiences through instant resolution pathways

McKinsey estimates that generative AI alone could add over $4 trillion annually to global GDP—more than the entire GDP of the UK. This isn't incremental improvement; it's a fundamental reshaping of competitive dynamics.

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The Strategic Shift: From Task-Focused to Value-Creation Teams

Smart organizations are approaching AI with a specific goal: offloading repetitive processes to enable full human potential.

"We are helping organizations to automate their repetitive process and help them to be more productive and achieve higher value for their operations," Ahmed noted. "Employees do not enjoy doing repetitive tasks. They are actually looking for fulfilling work."

This isn't just about cost-cutting—it's about strategic reallocation of human capacity:

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Real-World Application: How Leading Organizations Deploy AI Automation

The most effective AI implementations target specific friction points rather than pursuing "innovation theater."

For inventory management, "AI actually can receive this document, review it, check that you actually bought this item, and then book it off in your ERP system, and hence, automate that process and keep track of your inventory," Ahmed explained.

Similarly, in customer experience:

"Customers do not want to talk to your customer support. Actually, in every single survey, it says that customers prefer a touchless and instant process, and the only way to do this is with AI."

Elite organizations like Siemens and DEWA aren't just experimenting—they're systematically identifying high-volume, rules-based processes where AI delivers immediate ROI:

• Customer inquiry processes with predictable resolution paths
  ERP and system updates that previously required manual intervention
• Document-heavy workflows with consistent patterns

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The Implementation Challenge: Why Most AI Initiatives Fail

Despite the potential, many organizations struggle to capture AI's value. The barrier is mostly organizational.

"The challenge that we face today is mainly an organizational challenge. How can we leverage this technology? How do we manage change? How do we transition to that direction smoothly? And this is something that at least the C suite cannot outsource."

The organizations succeeding with AI prioritize:

1. Building awareness across all levels about AI capabilities and implications
2. Creating structured change management processes for transitioning workflows
3. Empowering employees to identify automation opportunities in their areas
4. Measuring success beyond cost reduction to include employee and customer impact

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The Coming Disruption: Small Teams with Enterprise Impact

Perhaps most intriguing is Ahmed's vision of how AI will reshape organizational structures themselves:

"Now, will that job will be with the same organization or with would we start to see the first one person or 10 people, billion organizations appearing in the next decade, because you know now you can augment yourself and be able to create innovative ideas and products without really needing crazy resources to make it happen."

This suggests an existential competitive threat: AI enables entirely new classes of lean competitors who can deliver enterprise-scale impact with minimal headcount.

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How to Prepare Your Organization for the AI Advantage

Based on Ahmed's insights and our work with leading organizations, we recommend a three-phase approach to gaining competitive advantage through AI:

Phase 1: Discovery and Awareness

• Invest in AI literacy across leadership
• Map current processes to identify high-volume, repetitive workflows
• Benchmark your operational efficiency against industry leaders

Phase 2: Strategic Implementation

• Prioritize projects based on employee impact, customer experience, and ROI
• Create cross-functional teams that blend domain and technical expertise
• Develop clear success metrics beyond cost savings

Phase 3: Organizational Transformation

• Evolve team structures to focus on high-value work
• Develop new skills in process design and exception handling
• Create feedback loops to continuously identify new automation opportunities

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The Bottom Line: AI Is Now a Competitive Requirement

The competitive landscape has fundamentally changed. Organizations that continue to waste human potential on repetitive processes will be outpaced by those who leverage AI to unlock their teams' full creative and strategic capacity.

As Ahmed emphasizes, this isn't about replacing people, it's about redirecting their energy toward the complex, nuanced problems, toward a customer experience that drives real competitive advantage.

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