Our CEO and co-founder, Nadiem von Heydebrand, sat down with Justin Heller for CDO Magazine's interview series to talk about what it actually means to stop managing AI projects and start managing AI impact.
The conversation covers why so many data and AI teams report on activity instead of value, how to build a business case before committing resources, the shift from project thinking to product thinking, and the one change Nadiem recommends to every data and AI leader trying to prove business impact: start with use cases.
Key discussion points:
- Output is what a team delivers. Outcome is the output that creates added value for the person receiving it, and most data teams are still measured on the former.
- A project has a fixed start and end. A product doesn't, and ROI, value divided by cost, has to be tracked continuously rather than settled once at project close.
- Most demand reaching data and AI teams isn't a use case yet, it's a request for a solution. The job is separating the two and finding the real business problem underneath.
- Most boardroom reporting still lists activities and jobs delivered rather than the business problem solved or the value it unlocked.
- Nadiem's closing sums up the conversation: no use case, no value.
