Don't invest in collaboration tech until you've sorted the wetware

I came back from an enterprise technology event in late 2019 with the same complaint I have had after every enterprise-tech event since. Every vendor on the floor was talking about the tools. Almost nobody was talking about the people who would have to use them. The pattern is the same in 2026. Only the slogans have changed: they now have AI in them. The underlying mistake is unchanged. Businesses keep investing in platforms before they invest in the human capability that makes those platforms productive.

This is the short version of the warning. Stop throwing money at collaboration technology, AI and automation until you understand how you are going to use it. Not because the technology doesn't work. It usually does. The problem is that most of the value you were sold in the procurement deck depends on people behaving in ways they currently don't. The platform doesn't cause the behaviour. The behaviour has to exist first.

What every enterprise-tech demo leaves out

There is a word for the part of an organisation that can't be automated: wetware. The people. The collective intelligence. The judgement, the relationships, the tacit understanding of why things have always been done a particular way. The things that can't go in a vendor's feature matrix, because they don't fit the slide template.

Wetware is where the value of most knowledge businesses lives. Everything else (the data, the processes, the systems) is a derivative artefact of decisions and judgements that wet, fallible, contextual humans made. When wetware leaves an organisation, the artefacts carry on existing for a while, but the capacity to update or extend them leaves with the people who built them.

This isn't sentimentality. An enterprise-tech investment that ignores the wetware is investing in the artefacts and not in the engine. The artefacts get faster, sleeker and more automated. The engine atrophies. Over a few years the business looks more modern and is structurally less capable.

What you save and what you lose

The trade-off is real, and worth being honest about. The big collaboration, AI and automation push does produce gains. It also produces losses, which usually don't appear on the same balance sheet as the gains.

The right answer is rarely “don't do it”. It is usually “do it with eyes open, and invest deliberately in the offsetting capabilities at the same time”. The mistake is investing in the left column without budgeting for the right.

Three horizons, usually in the wrong order

Here is the framing I drew up after the 2019 event: three horizons of investment, in the order most businesses think about them, and the order in which they should actually be sequenced.

The pattern I keep seeing is businesses investing heavily in the middle horizon, lightly in the first, and almost not at all in the third. The result is impressive demos, disappointing returns, and the quiet attrition of the people who used to make the place work.

What I'd ask before signing the cheque

If I am the CTO sitting across from a vendor pitching a collaboration platform, AI tool or automation programme, these are the four questions I want answered before signing. The answers don't decide whether to buy. Sometimes the answer is to buy anyway. They decide how much I need to add to the budget to make the purchase pay back.

1. What behaviour does this require my people to already have? Most platforms assume a way of working that doesn't currently exist. The platform itself doesn't produce the behaviour.
2. What behaviour does this make harder? Every tool inhibits some kinds of work while enabling others. Naming what gets harder is usually more informative than naming what gets easier.
3. Where is the exception-handling capacity coming from? Automation works for the 90% of cases that look like the training data. The remaining 10% needs people with the judgement and authority to do something different. Often they are the same people the platform was supposed to replace.
4. What wetware investment is going alongside this? If the answer is “some training videos”, the platform will under-deliver. The wetware investment is the structural one: collaboration discipline, decision-making process, sensing capability. Not a course on the new UI.

Collaboration tech doesn't make people collaborate. AI doesn't make decisions wisely. Automation doesn't handle exceptions. The wetware does. Invest in it first, or in parallel. Don't pretend the platform purchase has done the work.

I have not yet been on a procurement committee where someone asks “what is the wetware budget for this project?” and gets a coherent answer. Until that is a normal question in technology buying, most enterprise platforms will keep under-delivering on the promises in the procurement deck. The mistake is in the deck, not the platform.

Four things worth taking seriously

For boards: before approving a platform, AI or automation programme, ask what the wetware budget is. If nobody can answer coherently, the business case is incomplete.

For CTOs and CIOs: ask the four questions before signing. They will not tell you whether to buy, but they will tell you how much to add to the budget for the purchase to pay back.

For anyone planning an AI or automation rollout: plan for the exceptions. The cases that don't look like the training data need people with judgement and authority, and they are often the people the rollout was meant to replace.

For anyone setting investment priorities: the wetware horizon never finishes. Fund it continuously, or the ‘soon’ investments will stall after the demo.

I would be interested to hear whether anyone in your organisation has asked for the wetware budget on a technology purchase, and what answer they got.

Related: Conscious Collaboration · Conscious Agility · Lean is dead · all writing