Airlines create friction on purpose. Your SME creates it by accident

The airline industry has mastered a business model every B2B CEO should study – and then completely avoid.

You know the hassle. Wasting 30 minutes on online check-in. Fighting through spam, logins, upsell screens – then standing in the "Bag Drop" queue for 50 minutes.

Physical friction plus cognitive friction.

Airlines create this on purpose. They know you're locked in.

In SMEs, friction usually isn't intentional. It appears when the groundwork wasn't done.

Employees tell the same story: digital transformation made things worse. They now satisfy the new system AND do the real work using old processes.

What they've built are coping tools:

→ ERP so rigid that procurement runs parallel processes in Excel→ CRM so slow that sales coordinate via WhatsApp→ Documentation says "Step A → Step B," reality involves three calls and a sticky note

Those workarounds aren't the problems. They're intelligence about what your process cannot do.

They become problems when they involve ChatGPT with questionable compliance and business-critical data.

That's why you need to map them now and build AI systems that securely process your proprietary data.

Something fundamental has shifted: open-source LLMs have caught up. You can train small, specialized models for specific workflows that outperform generalist models – and keep everything on your infrastructure.

For proprietary processes and compliance-regulated workflows – you no longer need to choose between capability and sovereignty.

The groundwork for sovereign AI:

→ Map your application landscape – which systems exist, what do they do?→ Map actual workflows – where does data flow? Where are workarounds?→ Assess data quality – incomplete data breaks implementations before code does→ Identify what stays internal – regulatory data, trade secrets, process knowledge→ Find the co-creators – employees excited about building better systems

Then pilot quick wins: invoice processing, offer creation, lead scoring, email routing.

This reveals which processes need sovereign infrastructure (on-premise or private cloud, you own the weights, zero vendor lock-in) versus which can use public APIs.

Your employees know where the intelligence lives. The Excel sheets. The WhatsApp groups. The "ask Anna" patterns.

That's accumulated process knowledge – workarounds that work, edge cases your documentation misses, domain expertise that takes years to develop.

When you train your private AI model on your workflows and employee expertise, you control the outcome. No data leakage. No surprise pricing changes. No silent model updates breaking production.

Airlines can afford to frustrate customers because, once booked, they're a temporary monopoly. SMEs rarely have this luxury.

Map the friction. Capture the intelligence. Build an AI system that compounds your competitive advantage instead of renting it from someone else.