Transformation in practice – it’s time to explore what fast tracking change with automation can really do.
Most leadership teams are now asking some version of the same question: where can AI and automation save us time? It’s a sensible question. Most businesses carry work that is slow, repetitive and frustrating and the pressure to create capacity is real.
There’s a risk in reaching for the tool first. If a process is confused, duplicated or more complicated than it needs to be, automating it doesn’t fix it. It just makes the wrong process happen faster and makes it harder to see. The key thing is you can’t sensibly decide what to keep, change or remove until you properly understand the work.
What “understanding the work” means
Transformation in practice is practical and ‘understanding the work’ is simpler than it sounds. For any process you’re considering automating, you should be able to answer six questions:
- What actually happens, as opposed to what the procedure says happens?
- Why does it happen that way?
- Who touches it and what do they do to it?
- Where does information move and where is it re-keyed, copied or chased?
- Where are decisions made and on what basis?
- Which steps add genuine value for the customer or the business and which exist because they always have?
Only then is it worth asking where technology can help. Sometimes it can help a great deal but the order matters.
The evidence points the same way. McKinsey’s global survey on AI, published in March 2025, drew on 1,491 respondents. Across the 25 organisational attributes it tested, redesigning workflows had the biggest effect on an organisation’s ability to see bottom-line (EBIT) impact from generative AI. Yet only 21% of respondents whose organisations used generative AI said they had fundamentally redesigned even some workflows.
It is a self-reported survey and shows correlation rather than proof of cause. Even so, it supports the same conclusion: the value tends to come from how the work is redesigned, not just from the tool.
Transformation in practice: Where technology earns its place
None of this is an argument against AI or automation. It is an argument for using them where they earn their place. Once a process is understood and sound, technology can take out repetitive effort, speed up routine decisions and improve consistency. It becomes one tool alongside process improvement and people development and a much more effective one, because it is applied to work that is worth doing faster.
A note for anyone assessing a business
Transformation in practice means the same distinction matters when you’re looking at a business from the outside, whether as an investor, a board or a potential acquirer. Not every inefficiency is the same kind of problem.
Some are operational. Work is duplicated, handovers are unclear, processes are undocumented and systems don’t connect. These are frustrating and costly but they can usually be improved within the existing business model.
Others are structural. They sit in how the business makes money or is organised: its cost base, its dependence on a few customers, its market position or how leadership and decision-making are set up. These are harder and slower to fix and no amount of tooling will change them.
Being clear about which is which shapes the value you can realistically expect and the effort it will take to get there.
How we approach transformation in practice at Alcea
This is how we work with ambitious medium-sized businesses. We are a business transformation consultancy and AI is one of the tools we use rather than the starting point.
We begin by understanding the business and its ambitions, then look across leadership, processes, people, technology, data, culture and governance to see what is really going on. From there we work with leaders and teams to redesign ways of working and remove friction. Technology, including AI, is introduced where it will make a sound process better. We then support people through the change with coaching, communication and training and measure the result in business terms: efficiency, profitability, scalability and long-term value.
Two examples show what transformation in practice looks like.
A business support division in a local authority asked for help with friction-heavy, high-effort work. Through half-day workshops and one-to-one sessions with a team of 20, we mapped how their priority processes really ran then designed how they could run better. That work identified potential time savings of up to 20% across the team’s priority workflows. It also shaped the recommendations for a wider CRM project, so the technology would be built around the redesigned work rather than the old one.
A family-run automotive parts manufacturer had a sales and marketing team spending around 60% of its time on repetitive enquiries. We standardised how the team worked and designed a tiered response system, so common questions were handled automatically with best-practice answers and experienced people could focus on the higher-value ones. Time spent on administration and general enquiries fell to around 20%, freeing up roughly two days to put into business development.
In both cases the sequence was the same: understand the work, redesign it, then let technology support it.
The practical starting point
Pick one process that causes real friction. Map what actually happens, with the people who do it. Ask why each step exists. Then decide what to fix, what to remove and what, if anything, to automate.
If you’d like to talk through where to start, we’re happy to have that conversation at alceaconsulting.com.