AI: How does the impact factory influence artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is only a tool serving a system. Like any digital tool, its purpose is to accelerate actions whose manual execution would generate waste. But if the system using it is flawed, AI will only amplify the disorder and make the chaos uncontrollable. Impact factories are aware of this: they first adapt their processes to their real needs, and then their tools — including artificial intelligence — to those processes. 

“Technology is the solution! What’s the problem?”
It’s a sentence I’ve often heard in the tech world, where innovation wavers between invention and application.

Testing new technologies is essential — without experimentation, no use cases ever emerge. That’s how major breakthroughs are born: from the web, created to connect researchers, to 3D printing, which became a tool for local autonomy.

But when technology is applied to everything — a blockchain to manage a simple spreadsheet, or AI to screen job applications without addressing bias — chaos follows. Technology amplifies whatever it touches: a clear system gains efficiency, a confused one becomes uncontrollable.

Impact factories avoid this trap by flipping the logic: they start with the problem, not the solution. They observe the field, form hypotheses, and test on a small scale before scaling up. This iterative, need-driven approach turns technology into a lever for impact — not a generator of complexity.