A conversation with Michele Lane on how to see past AI marketing hype, evaluate what a platform can actually do, and buy capability instead of another feature.
Welcome back to The Pour, the show where we sit down with the founders, marketers, and innovators we work with, ask one big question, and answer it before the coffee runs out.
This episode, Moxie Labs co-founder James Koran is joined by Michele Lane, founder and CEO of Sage Paradigm, a boutique digital transformation consultancy she built to help organizations navigate complex technology and operational decisions through a human-centric lens. Before Sage Paradigm, she held senior leadership roles at eBay, Magento, and Adobe. (She also showed up with tasting notes on her coffee, a dark roast Mexican blend, which promptly put the rest of us to shame.)
Lately, Michele has been helping a large hourly employer rethink its hiring as AI changes the game. That work leads to a question nearly every company is wrestling with as it evaluates the software running its business: what do companies get wrong when they try to put AI to work?
Michele’s answer is blunt: they fall for the label.
“AI-powered is getting slapped on everything. It’s becoming a marketing label, not a product function.”
Start with the bottleneck, not the label
Once “AI-powered” is on every product page, the checkbox stops meaning as much. The better place to start is not with what AI can do in theory, but with where your process actually breaks down. What is slowing people down? Where is work getting stuck? What problem is important enough to solve?
AI is worth paying for when it meaningfully addresses one of those bottlenecks. If it does not, the label may sound impressive, but the business value is still missing.
Make the vendor prove it
That changes the way teams should evaluate AI software. Instead of asking a vendor, “Does your platform have AI?” ask them to show you exactly what the AI changes.
What does it make faster, easier, more accurate, or more effective? Ask for one concrete example. If a vendor cannot show where the capability improves the experience or the work, the “AI-powered” label is not giving you much to evaluate.
Buy the capability, not the feature
This is where feature lists can become a distraction. A feature tells you something exists. A capability tells you what your organization can actually do better because it exists.
If the AI does not solve a bottleneck that matters, you have not bought a capability. You have bought a feature.
James and Michele also dig into what happens after the demo. A bolted-on chatbot, for example, can quietly leave a team maintaining two codebases instead of one. And the platform you choose may be with you for three to five years. That makes slowing down long enough to evaluate the architecture, the operational impact, and the long-term fit part of the decision, not an extra step.
The takeaway is simple: do not buy the label. Start with the problem, ask for proof, and make sure the capability is worth living with long after the pitch deck is gone.
Pour a cup and watch the full conversation on The Pour.
Connect with Michele Lane on LinkedIn, or learn more about her work at SageParadigm.com.
One cup of coffee. One big question. That’s The Pour. See you on the next episode.
