Tal Frankfurt is the Founder and CEO of Cloud for Good, a Salesforce partner that creates transformational value with technology.
I grew up around construction. My grandfather was a plasterer. My father installed alarm systems in new buildings, and when I was younger, I spent summers on jobsites with him carrying cement bags, handing him tools and watching him work. I didn’t know it then, but those jobsites taught me some of the most useful business lessons I’ve ever learned.
The contractors who won work weren’t the ones with the newest drills or the fastest wire pullers. They were the ones who showed up, did the job right, got it done on time and delivered value. Tools improved every year, but the value was never in owning the tools. The value was in delivering the outcome.
I’ve been thinking about those jobsites a lot lately as I watch the AI conversation unfold across the technology and services industry.
The Moment I Saw It Play Out In Real Time
Before founding Cloud for Good, I was director of advancement at a nonprofit working with at-risk immigrant youth. We needed a way to manage donors, volunteers and program participants without a room full of spreadsheets. That search led me to Salesforce and, eventually, to building a company around it.
What I learned in those early years was that the organizations that got the most out of their CRM were the ones that knew what outcome they were trying to achieve before they touched the platform. The tool was secondary. Clarity of purpose came first.
I’ve watched this pattern repeat itself hundreds of times over the last couple of decades. A nonprofit arrives excited about new technology: from mobile, to social, to data and now AI. The ones who struggle are almost always the ones that led with the shiny object. They bought it first and asked what to do with it second. The ones who thrived always started with the mission and worked backward to the technology.
What This Means For Organizations Right Now
At Cloud for Good, we work with nonprofit organizations, credit unions and higher education institutions every day. These mission-driven teams shouldn’t focus on the tools but on creating a positive change in their communities.
The numbers bear this out. A 2025 MIT study found that 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots fail to deliver measurable impact. Organizations are acquiring capability before they have defined the outcome. Meanwhile, a 2023 Salesforce survey found that surveyed salespeople spent 72% of their time on non-selling tasks, administrative work, data entry and internal meetings. The opportunity is not more technology, it’s a clearer application of it.
At the leadership level, the mindset is finally catching up. Another Salesforce survey found that in 2020, 70% of responding CFOs held a conservative AI strategy. By 2025, that number was down to 4%. The urgency is real, but urgency without clarity is just noise.
What I’m seeing is a split forming in the market. On one side, organizations are scrambling to purchase AI tools, hoping the technology will solve problems on its own. On the other side, the smartest operators are using AI to deliver better outcomes faster, positioning themselves not as software resellers but as indispensable partners in execution.
The second group isn’t threatened by the next model upgrade. It welcomes it. Every improvement in the underlying AI makes its service faster to deliver, cheaper to run and more valuable to the client. The tool is getting better, making it better. When you focus on value, there’s a compounding advantage, not a commodity trap.
The Race Nobody Wants To Be In
If your business model depends on selling access to an AI tool, you’re in a race you can’t win. The foundation models are improving at a pace no product team can outrun. Yesterday’s differentiator is tomorrow’s default. The organizations that have positioned themselves as tool vendors are already feeling this pressure.
If your model is built around delivering work, around taking the outcome off the client’s plate and owning the result, AI becomes your biggest asset. You’re not competing with the model. You’re riding it.
Back To Construction
My grandfather plastered walls for decades. New tools came and went. Better mixes, better compounds, better boards. He learned them, used them and kept working. What never changed was that buildings needed smooth walls and someone who knew how to deliver them.
My dad wired buildings through years of evolving technology. Better sensors, smarter panels, wireless systems that made half of his old equipment obsolete. He adapted. What didn’t change was that building owners needed their people and assets protected, and they needed someone they trusted to handle it.
Neither of them ever lost sleep over a better drill coming out. They weren’t in the drill business.
The question every leader should be sitting with right now is simple: Are you in the tool business, or are you in the outcome business? In the AI era, that distinction will determine everything.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
