ROI Tracker Deferred Pending More Confidence

A spreadsheet has become culturally insensitive at Bellwether Voss.

Not offensive in any conventional sense. It has not expressed an opinion about the partners' paintings. It has asked whether the firm's $3.8 million investment in artificial intelligence has produced $3.8 million of anything.

This is apparently not the right moment.

Bellwether Voss is an NA10 firm. That is the North American Top 10. Everyone else is mid law, including firms with their own aircraft and offices visible from space. We will return to this entirely healthy classification system another time.

For now, we need to discuss the spreadsheet.

It was built by the finance team after the firm's third presentation about “unlocking unprecedented value”. Someone in finance had the unforgivable instinct to look for the unlocked value in the accounts.

They found the expenditure immediately. There was a number, an invoice and a person who had been very keen to get it paid before the end of the quarter. The benefits were less formally constituted.

This is where Nearly comes in. Nearly is Bellwether Voss's measurement platform, and it has been configured to record everything about the AI programme except whether it is working.

It records licences purchased. It records training invitations sent. It records “engaged users”, a category which includes a partner who opened the application because he mistook it for his expenses.

He is now a digital champion. Marketing has asked him for a photograph.

The number of prompts is particularly encouraging. Thousands. Wonderful. A thriving digital workplace. Unfortunately, nobody has separated the useful prompts from “No, not that”, “Use the document I uploaded” and “Why have you put this in French?”

Imagine measuring a restaurant's success by the number of times customers summon the waiter. Under this system, food poisoning would be a record quarter for engagement.

But a few people have done useful work. An associate called Maya developed a method that reduced a routine review from nine hours to two. Her supervisor congratulated her, then asked about the seven-hour hole in her time sheet.

The firm has therefore recorded the improvement twice: once as a technology success and once as a performance concern.

That is impressively joined-up management. Most businesses need separate departments to contradict themselves this efficiently.

The original spreadsheet tried to put these things together: expenditure, time, price, quality, what the client actually received. It was not perfect. It required assumptions. It distinguished between an estimated saving and a saving that had occurred.

The executive committee felt these distinctions risked confusing the narrative.

The narrative, incidentally, is that the firm is transforming. The spreadsheet was merely suggesting that someone specify into what.

So the measurement project has been paused until the partnership has greater confidence in the results. There is no indication of what would produce this confidence, since producing results was the purpose of the measurement project.

In the meantime, the innovation team has been asked to demonstrate momentum without supplying figures that might be mistaken for a commitment.

They have commissioned a film.

It shows a partner walking through a glass corridor while the words Judgement. Reimagined. appear beside him. He reaches a meeting room, nods at a screen and appears satisfied. We are not shown the screen.

An early edit included a calculator on the table. This has been removed.

The annual software renewal falls due on Friday. Unlike the benefits, that figure has already been approved.