Beyond AI Theater: Building AI Results Worth Talking About

Impactful AI starts where people, process, and technology meet, and ends with a story worth telling.

Most growth-stage companies are using AI somewhere by now. There’s a coding assistant, a support bot, maybe a model tucked into the product. AI adoption is often described as the competitive edge, table stakes for any company ready to grow. But when nearly everyone has adopted AI, simply having it isn’t what sets a company apart. The real question is whether the business was ready for the tools it brought in and if using them is actually making an impact on the business. In a recent webinar, our Director of Innovation, Dusty Fields, explored the impact of AI with Kate Ishay, co-founder and CEO of our partner Psyche Digital. Below, we’re sharing our biggest takeaways.

Dusty anchored the webinar in an idea Tonic’s CEO, Ellen Caviglia, often shares:

AI doesn’t fix a weak process. It scales it. Hand AI a workflow that three people describe three different ways, and you’ve built a fast, cheap way to produce inconsistency.

That’s why the most valuable AI work starts with questions, not tools. Where can AI actually move the needle? What has to be true inside the company for an initiative to be worth the resourcing? And once it’s live, what story can you tell about its impact? The answers rarely come down to technology alone. Good AI use lives at the intersection of people, process, and technology (and most companies overinvest in only the last one).

Real readiness starts with the work, not the tool. That means mapping how a process actually runs, who owns the outcome, and where people still need to make the call. Most importantly, it means knowing the baseline for whatever task you’re asking AI to help with. Without one, there’s nothing to measure improvement against. That gap is where “AI theater” thrives: activity that looks like progress but measures nothing. “We cut onboarding from 12 days to four” is a tangible outcome a new tool helped you deliver. “We use AI in onboarding” gets a polite nod and not much else.

The same principle applies to the story you tell about AI. A weak process gets scaled, and so does a vague story. As Kate put it, “we use AI” has become a non-answer, since everyone is using it. What investors and customers want to know is what changed, for whom, and by how much.

The good news is that the readiness and story work are the same. A mapped process with a baseline gives you a clear before-and-after. Investors hear it as leverage: the number that moved, the guardrails in place, and whether it’s a pattern you can repeat across the business. Customers hear it as relief: the three-day wait that’s now a few minutes, or the form they no longer have to fill out twice. The angle changes for each room, but the proof doesn’t.

And in both rooms, people want to know where the humans are. Being clear about what AI handles and where a person still makes the call is what builds trust. That clarity comes from the same place good AI work always starts: understanding how your team actually gets things done today. When you know that, you aren’t telling an AI story at all. You’re telling the story of a business that works better, for the people inside it and the people it serves.

Watch the full conversation below. And if you’re wondering whether your next AI initiative has a story worth telling, reach out to our team. We’d love to help you find out.