Author and business consultant Brian Evergreen explains why vision comes first – GeekWire
[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the adoption and impact of AI and agents. See coverage of our related event.]
If someone comes to your door with a chainsaw and says “let’s go over your house and see how we can make it better,” you might think you’ve hired the wrong contractor. But that’s how most companies approach AI – focusing on the tool’s capabilities rather than its mission statement.
That’s what Brian Evergreen has been doing for years, first as an AI leader at Microsoft, now as an author, strategist and consultant to Fortune 500 companies. In a recent live recording of the GeekWire Podcast, Evergreen laid out where companies should focus.
“Use cases are the friends of engineering, but the enemy of strategy,” says Evergreen. “Instead of being AI first, you need to be value first.”
Evergreen’s career has included roles at Accenture, AWS, and Microsoft, where he worked on AI from 2016 to 2023. As the company’s US AI strategy leader, he helped executives develop their technology plans, and saw firsthand that the traditional playbook didn’t work. They’ll start with a problem, pick a use case, go after the low-hanging fruit, and end up unsuccessful.
That experience led to his book, Automatic Conversionand the consulting work he now does with his firm, The Future Solving Company. His main argument: companies don’t need a better AI strategy. They need a vision of where they are going, and AI is one way to get there.
Here are some takeaways from the discussion:
People as an interface: Instead of putting AI in front of the customer, Evergreen says companies should put people there, with AI as middleware behind the scenes. He points to Klarna, which laid off 700 customer support staff and replaced them with AI, then tried to rebuild its people team.
Separate tasks from tasks: The job is accountability for the outcome, Evergreen says, and AI can’t hold that accountability. A better way: divide tasks into tasks, hand over repeatability to AI, and let humans focus on judgment and relationships.
Senior agency is important at all levels: Evergreen’s own work illustrates the point. He started at Accenture as a data entry contractor, taught himself SharePoint, automated his team’s workflows, and worked his way into a full-time consulting role. Lesson: don’t wait for permission.
Create new value, not cheap jobs: Many companies look to AI and ask how they can do what they already do faster, better, or cheaper. Evergreen says that misses the point. The biggest opportunity is to create new value that didn’t exist before, the way Netflix went from shipping DVDs to streaming.
The great importance of a clear vision: “Ideology is the only force with enough momentum to overcome organizational inertia,” Evergreen said. Without it, companies cannot have a real strategy. And without a strategy, they cannot make strategic decisions.
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