Sharpen the Axe First: why preparation beats tool hype.
From a live TESS Group AI workshop · captions included
“If I had an hour to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 45 minutes sharpening the axe rather than just whacking away with the blunt axe. Before we start swinging at the tree, what's the work we do in advance to make sure we're deploying the tools in the most likely way to succeed?”
The organisations that get value from AI aren't the ones that bought the most tools, they're the ones that prepared. This clip explains the principle behind the preparation modules in TESS apprenticeships.
Transcript
"If I had an hour to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 45 minutes sharpening the axe", rather than just whacking away at the tree with a blunt axe. That's what all this is about. That's what module two is about: before we start swinging at the tree, what's the stuff we do in advance to make sure we're deploying the tools in the way that's most likely to succeed?
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What this means for your team
Most failed AI roll-outs skip the sharpening. Teams are handed Copilot, Gemini or ChatGPT licences and told to find uses, so they find trivial ones and stop. The preparation work is unglamorous: map the processes that eat time, decide what good looks like, agree what the tool is and is not allowed to touch, and only then build. That sequence is how the AI and Automation Level 4 is structured, with process discovery before any automation is built.
If you want to see the sharpening done live on one of your own processes, the free AI taster day is a build-along, not a webinar.