Most vendors think embedding is a technical problem. Build enough integrations, capture enough data, create enough switching costsβand you’re safe. They’re wrong.
The real challenge is organizational. It’s navigating the political minefield of enterprise dysfunction.
What Each Department Says
IT: “Security first. Marketing keeps buying tools without telling us.”
Marketing: “Move fast. IT takes 6 months to approve anything.”
Sales: “Hit quota. Everything else is noise.”
Finance: “Cut costs. Prove ROI. Nobody can show clear returns.”
Operations: “Keep running. We’re holding everything together with duct tape.”
This isn’t dysfunction. This is normal. Every enterprise operates this way. The question isn’t whether silos existβthey always do. The question is whether your technology can bridge them without making them worse.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
