The real risk isn't AI

Every day I'm struck by the paradox of many Italian companies.

We're in the age of Artificial Intelligence. A revolution that in the rest of the world is already reshaping productivity, company organization and decision-making speed.

And yet, walking into companies and talking every day with business owners, CFOs, operations managers and administrative heads, the reality I often see is still this:

• people copying data from a PDF into a management system
• orders entered by hand
• reports built manually in Excel
• information traveling over email
• entire departments stuck on repetitive tasks

The thing I find most absurd? That many of these activities could already be automated today. Not in 10 years, not “in the future”, today.

And the problem isn't the technology. The solutions already exist.

The real problem is the mindset

The real problem is the mindset with which many companies face change. Because in Italy there's still a very strong culture of:

“we've always done it this way”

A phrase we've normalized over the years, but that today risks becoming extremely dangerous.

Because while many Italian companies are still trying to figure out whether AI is really useful, elsewhere they're already:

• drastically cutting operational times
• automating internal processes
• increasing margins
• making decisions faster
• scaling without proportionally increasing headcount

And this creates an enormous competitive gap.

Buying an AI tool doesn't mean innovating

The most worrying part, though, is another one. Many companies talk about innovation, but in reality they're not changing anything: buying an AI tool doesn't mean innovating.

Innovating means:

• rethinking processes
• eliminating historical inefficiencies
• training people
• changing the way you work

And this is where I see the greatest resistance among Italian management. Not so much toward the technology. But toward the organizational change that technology entails.

Because truly automating means:

• questioning entrenched habits
• redefining roles
• changing operational flows
• accepting that some processes exist only because “we've always done it this way”

Skilled people, extremely low-value tasks

As a Sales Account, the thing that strikes me most is seeing extremely skilled people spend hours on extremely low-value tasks:

• copy/paste
• manual checks
• data entry

Time that could be invested in higher value-added activities geared toward company growth.

And yet many businesses keep chasing growth by increasing the operational load, instead of increasing efficiency. But this model now shows all its limits. Because today's market rewards speed, adaptability and the ability to scale — not the quantity of manual work.

The real risk

And the real risk isn't that AI replaces people. The real risk is that companies faster at adopting it replace, on the market, the ones that keep putting it off.

Those who innovate evolve. Those who stand still lose competitiveness. And the time to decide which side to be on is shrinking far faster than many believe.

Mattia Annibale Labonia