One Question for Your Monday: What Will You Stop Doing?
Here is this Monday’s question, and it can kill a bad purchase in about ten seconds:
What will we stop doing when this works?
It’s the one you can answer without any preparation, which is exactly why it belongs at the front of every AI conversation rather than the end.
If the answer is “nothing, people will just have the tool available,” stop there. You’re about to buy shelfware. Availability is not adoption, and a tool that runs alongside the existing process is a tool competing with muscle memory under deadline pressure. That contest has a predictable winner.
The honest answers sound different, and they’re specific:
- We stop hand-building the Monday report; the human role becomes review and send.
- We stop routing every process question through the one person who knows.
- We stop the Thursday status sync, because status is now visible without a meeting.
Notice that each of those names a thing that visibly ends, on a date, with someone responsible for ending it. That’s what makes it a workflow change rather than a purchase.
The uncomfortable version of this question: if you can’t name what stops, you haven’t designed a change yet. You’ve selected a vendor. Those are different projects with different owners, and only one of them produces the hours you’re hoping to recover.
Worth asking today about whatever’s already running, not just what you’re evaluating next. Plenty of tools already in your stack were never given a job. Five concrete examples of workflows worth changing are here if you want candidates, and why tool-first buying skips this question entirely is here.
Naming what stops is the hardest part of the first conversation, and the most valuable. Bring yours.
Rosemarie Withee has spent thirteen years helping operations teams get real work out of their software, first Microsoft 365, now AI. She’s written six books for Wiley and builds AI products at Portal Integrators.