Author

Tom Lanaway

Published

2 March 2026

Estimated Read time

4Mins

Tom Lanaway is Head of Innovation at Connective3, a global brand & performance marketing agency. He leads a team building AI-powered marketing measurement and marketing intelligence tools.

Most businesses are asking the wrong question about AI. They’re asking, ‘Which AI tool should we use?’ They should be asking: ‘Can our people actually think with AI?’ 

I run an innovation team at a marketing agency. We’ve spent the last two years building AI into everything we do, including measurement, content, strategy, and automation. We’ve got lots of tools, 18 different products to be precise. 

Below is what I’ve learned. But the tools aren’t always the bottleneck; sometimes the skills are. 

The Tennis Racket Problem 

A colleague put it perfectly recently: “AI is a tool. Think of it as if you’ve got a smart assistant sat there. But it’s saying, I’m going to give you the best tennis racket, now go and play in a Grand Slam.” 

That metaphor stuck with me because it captures something the artificial intelligence hype cycle keeps missing. We’ve convinced ourselves it democratises everything. That anyone can now do anything. That the barrier to entry has collapsed. And there’s truth in that, but it’s incomplete. The barrier to access has collapsed, but the barrier to effectiveness hasn’t. Give someone GPT-4, and they can generate text. Give them the best tennis racket, and they can hit a ball. But the gap between hitting a ball and playing at Wimbledon is still vast. Most organisations are stuck in that gap, wondering why their AI investments aren’t transforming anything. 

Three Skills That Aren’t Always Present 

When I look at where teams struggle and where I see the same patterns across other businesses, three specific competencies keep showing up as gaps: 

1. Problem Decomposition 

Not everyone knows how to break down complex work into chunks that AI can help with. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. Most people approach AI with whole tasks such as ‘Write me a marketing strategy’, ‘Analyse this data’ Or ‘Create a campaign’. AI will then produce something, but it’s usually mediocre, because the person hasn’t done the harder work of understanding which specific parts of that task AI is good at, and which parts need human judgment. The skill isn’t using AI; it’s knowing what to give it. Someone who is brilliant at their job but can’t decompose problems will get worse results from AI than someone more junior who understands how to break work into the right pieces.  

2. Output Assessment 

How do you know if what AI gives you is good? This is where intuition becomes essential and it’s also where the ‘AI replaces expertise’ narrative falls apart. You need domain knowledge to evaluate AI output. You need enough experience to feel when something’s off, even if you can’t immediately articulate why. You need the pattern recognition that comes from years of doing the actual work. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t replace that intuition; it requires it. The best AI users I’ve observed aren’t the most technical; they’re the ones who’ve built up enough expertise in their field to quickly assess whether AI output is useful, directionally correct, or completely off base. They know what good looks like, so they can recognise it when they see it, or notice when it’s missing.

3. Articulation 

Can you clearly express what you really want? This is the unglamorous core of the whole thing. Some people struggle to articulate their requirements to other humans, let alone to AI. We’ve all sat in meetings where someone spends 20 minutes explaining what they need, and you’re still not sure what they want. AI makes that problem worse. The skill isn’t ‘prompt engineering’ in the technical sense; it’s the much older skill of clear thinking and clear communication. If you can’t articulate what you want specifically, precisely, with the right context and constraints, you won’t get useful output from AI or from anyone else. 

The Uncomfortable Implication 

Here’s what this means for how businesses should think about AI investment: 

Stop leading with tools: Most organisations have tool fatigue already. Another platform, another integration, another training session on which buttons to click. It’s not working. 

Start with the human work: Before asking ‘What AI should we use?’, ask ‘Can our people break down problems, assess output, and articulate requirements?’ If they can’t do those things well without AI, they won’t do them well with AI either. 

Invest in the skills, not just the access: This doesn’t mean AI prompt engineering courses; it means developing clearer thinking, better problem decomposition, and sharper articulation. These are old skills, applied to new tools. 

Accept that expertise still matters: The people who’ll use AI best are the ones who already know their domain deeply. AI amplifies competence; it doesn’t create it.

Connected Intelligence Isn’t About Connected Systems 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how different marketing channels and data sources connect and how you build intelligence across systems rather than in silos.

But I’ve come to think the more important connection isn’t between systems, it’s between human judgment and AI capability. The integration layer that matters most is the one between the person and the tool. 

Get that wrong, and it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your AI stack is. Get it right, and even basic tools become powerful. 

Learn more at connective3.com

  • AI in Procurement
  • Artificial Intelligence in FinTech
  • Data & AI
  • Digital Strategy
  • People & Culture

Author

Anthony Marshall

Published

4 September 2024

Estimated Read time

7Mins

Anthony Marshall, Procurement Specialist at Barkers, on how IT procurement can add real value to financial services firms.

IT Procurement within financial services (FS) represents a complex mix of functions. There are many requirements, stakeholders, and suppliers to tackle. This is not to mention the need for regulatory compliance as well as third party risk management and operational resilience.

In addition, the nature of the market, particularly within the banking sector, is changing significantly. The demand for branches and ATMs has significantly decreasedm with much more appetite for on-demand digital services. This shift has created an opportunity for new agile, digital-centric banks to enter and quickly steal market share. These challenger entities are doing so largely through highly tailored and slick customer offerings. These digital offerings allow for rapid adaptability. They enable offerings to be quickly changed or configured in order to rapidly adapt to external market factors. For example: interest rate changes.

By contrast, traditional banking institutions still operate ‘mainframes’ and complicated legacy architecture. This is complex and costly to change and update.

Compliance and governance should be seen as a critical part of procurement’s purpose. However, it is imperative that it is not allowed to dominate thinking, neglecting the broader value of IT procurement. It’s crucial now more than ever that IT procurement proactively seeks to redefine its role. It must focus on being more than just a function that enforces compliance and process. Rather, it must be a valued thought partner to the IT function that guides and enables transformation and drives greater efficiencies.

Below are some of the key challenges that IT procurement professionals may face within financial services:

Complexity requirements

There is a broad range of evolving services in FS. In turn, this results in wide ranging requirements for technology to deliver. This is invariably coupled with a broad and diverse set of stakeholders with competing objectives and agendas. These stakeholders can often be in conflict with each other. This can lead to two key issues. Firstly, a long list of suppliers who provide the same or very similar core capabilities. Secondly, the over adoption of some platforms and deploying the wrong technology for the wrong reasons. Both outcomes will result in a higher cost base. And, in the latter instance particularly, sub-optimal performance and a high supplier concentration risk.

Processes, policies and regulations

Tight process and governance is a must-have in all FS organisations; regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK exist to protect individuals, businesses and the economy, and organisations need to evidence compliance. There is a risk, however, that processes and policies become a dominant focus of IT procurement. This, in turn, can lead to a negative perception or the function being seen as a barrier to transformation.

Suppliers

Suppliers can always be challenging regardless of the sector. In particular, however, there’s often a heightened level of incumbent supplier dependency within FS. This makes them especially tricky to manage. This supplier dependency is largely driven by complex legacy architecture and integration. Unchecked, it creates a scenario where suppliers understand that it would take years to move away and a resultant position of higher leverage for the supplier. Add to this diverse and competing stakeholders and requirements, as well as the perception of FS organisations being “cash rich”, and suppliers will often see the opportunity to increase their revenue via expanding their product offerings, or applying increases to cost on current contracts.

To that end, below are five essential tips for any financial services IT department to help manage this challenging environment.

1. Align with technical categories

Due to the large and diverse nature of FS organisations, it’s highly beneficial to align spend by category technology type. It’s important not to purely align to stakeholders as this will

significantly reduce consolidation and rationalisation opportunities. Aligning by technology also presents further opportunities for procurement to leverage organisational scale and build up SME knowledge within each category. For each category, understand what your renewal pipeline is and ensure that you align this with the technology roadmap and strategy. This will enable key priorities and a strategic sourcing approach to be defined.

Given the digital transformation challenge that many FS organisations face, a long-term

view is critical to avoid running into contract renewals with embedded suppliers with little

leverage and opportunity to influence. Appropriate planning and strategy (and time to do so) is key to ultimately ensuring successful negotiations that strike the right balance of long-term commercial protection vs unlocking value.

2. Build relationships and be willing to flex

It’s imperative that collaborative relationships are established with both ‘on the ground’ stakeholders and decision makers. This is about understanding the organisational objectives but also being proactive in presenting opportunities, risks and potential actions to address. What is particularly important and valued within FS is the ability to flex and work with stakeholders to approach each situation in the best way possible, acknowledging that in many circumstances market tenders may often be of little value. This doesn’t mean that formal tenders are redundant, far from it, but where long-term cost certainty of a current platform is the priority, it is essential to consider other ways of approaching the negotiation and generating leverage.

The ability to offer alternative approaches such as benchmarking and understanding how to leverage this alongside supplier organisation objectives are key to ensuring that IT procurement is seen as a solution-based enabler, even in challenging unavoidable single source scenarios.

3. Understand and objectively challenge requirements

Given the complexity of the technology landscape within FS, there will often be a gap between aspiration and reality, which can lead to over-buying or shelfware. Given this, it’s critical that requirements receive appropriate challenges and are objectively pushed back on. This is not a case of simply saying no, but rather providing a commercial interpretation of the situation and playing back potential options or approaches. It’s important to remember that this area of thinking often won’t be the priority or core competency of a given IT function who will predominantly be focussed on fulfilling a business requirement in the best way possible. It is therefore IT procurement’s responsibility to provide healthy and collaborative challenges.

4. Own the negotiation and know how to do it

Given the complex nature of infrastructure within FS organisations, IT is rarely negotiated in circumstances where an incumbent solution can be easily and cheaply swapped out. Incumbent technology platforms are often deeply embedded whilst investment in new technology is usually seen as critical to digital transformation (with a specific technology often pre-determined or highly favoured).

When considering negotiation approaches in this context, an essential starting point is establishing a minimum baseline of requirements and focussing on this as a priority – noting the often misalignment between aspiration and reality. Only once you have achieved an appropriate outcome on your baseline requirements should further conversations be entertained with suppliers. Given the often-complex nature of potential requirements, suppliers will often present over-scoped proposals based on what they see as the opportunity, badged as client requirements. It’s critical to not let suppliers drive the requirements but rather start from a minimum baseline of established requirements, whilst also starting to build a good understanding of the suppliers’ objectives.

Finally, whilst IT procurement should own the negotiation, this doesn’t mean going it

alone. Senior stakeholder relationships should be leveraged appropriately to arrive at the desired outcome, influenced by clear, insightful and influential briefings from IT procurement. This ensures that key messaging is delivered consistently.

5. Master the art of effective communication

To effectively act as a strategic thought partner to the IT function, it’s key that all of the great work and due diligence undertaken by IT procurement is communicated in a clear and concise manner. This may be done verbally. Often, when it comes to senior executives and decision makers, mastering the art of compelling written communication is key. This is the case both in terms of encouraging a decision to move in a particular direction or seeking support.

Rather than providing rigid bullet point summaries outlining key terms, benefits and risks, it’s important that IT procurement has the ability to clearly articulate the scenario, the practical options that are available, and most importantly an informed and objectively considered recommendation.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, now more than ever, the value that a high-functioning IT procurement can add cannot be undervalued. 

In a sector with ever evolving regulatory requirements and highly digital agendas, it’s essential for FS organisations that procurement acts as the commercial interpreter and advisor, guiding IT leaders through the process and helping to foster a collective focus on unlocking value and driving optimal outcomes.