Stop Building Technology No One Asked For

Mary Elizabeth Porray, the Global Vice Chair for Client Technology at EY and the COO of EY Global Growth & Innovation, explains why companies need to stop building technology nobody has actually asked for. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Imagine installing an AI-powered smart thermostat to reap energy-saving benefits, but the house is drafty, uninsulated, and has leaky windows. The algorithm spends its days trying to outthink the cold air, so instead of watching the savings roll in, the inefficiency ends up costing more. That’s the tech innovation rush we see today, where organizations invest in technology before they’ve identified or fixed the underlying customer problem they’re trying to solve.

The industry and boards reward speed. According to a Gartner estimate, global IT spending will total $6.08 trillion in 2026, an increase of 9.8 percent from 2025. However, innovation speed without purpose creates a unique risk: technology that solves the wrong problems, solutions with a limited shelf life, and capabilities that cause operational disruption rather than improvement. Artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as an example of this trap. Despite the vast investments, industry analysts suggest that 80 to 90 percent of AI initiatives struggle to progress beyond pilots. Meanwhile, most enterprises report material financial exposure from AI-related risks.

Breaking this requires a mindset shift: In a world filled with hammers, leaders must first identify the nail. In other words, organizations must set aside speed to first determine the right customer challenge worth solving before developing a product. Then this can serve as a path to deciding which technologies shape the product.

Why Tech Offerings Miss the Mark

Failure is, of course, diverse. With shifting market conditions, economic uncertainty, evolving customer needs, and rapid technological change, it’s easy to see how technology can fall short of expectations. Though most companies approach their tech development with well-intentioned goals, misalignment in identifying the specific outcomes to solve for before embarking on the innovation journey can become a major cause in misshaping the customer “nail.”

Customer pain points often get lost when technology teams lose sight of core product management values and prioritize new technology capabilities without addressing real business problems. Engineers who are excited by the possibilities of pushing the limits of their innovation often dive into new projects without first connecting function to customer need, creating a “build it and they will come” mindset that produces solutions lacking tangible customer demand. This results in innovations falling short because they are technology-driven, not business-driven.

For others, rushing to assume they understand the customers’ needs before directly validating with customers can lead to suboptimal technology development outcomes. Technology teams frequently assume they know the problem based on internal discussions or competitive pressure. However, the composition of product teams can greatly influence how well customer pain points are understood. Without a mix of business and product expertise alongside technical talent, it is challenging to accurately identify the outcomes most important to customers. In general, people who directly experience a problem are often better positioned to solve it. As such, technological development without a foundation in customer feedback can fail to land.

Blending Tech and Business for a Better Way Forward

Avoiding these pitfalls requires a cultural shift where business, operations, and technology work together rather than remain siloed. Teams that share insights and democratize information help the entire organization understand its customers and what solutions they actually need. In this vein, having a shared problem brief that identifies the customer challenge, the value at stake, and the conditions for success is critical.

This requires teams to ask some fundamental questions:

• What value are we trying to create?
• What problem needs to be solved?
• How will this support our overall goals?
• What do we need to get right (e.g., data, process, change readiness) for this to work?
• How will we measure the success of our solution?

Organizations building products and solutions through clear checkpoints for scaling and stopping progress are best positioned to keep customer ambitions grounded in outcomes. Only then can success and longevity be realized, and technology can refrain from becoming obsolete or unused.

Being transparent with customers is also key. Organizations must clearly communicate what their offering can and cannot do, so they can decide on the best solution for them. Selling someone what you don’t have is a good way not only for a project to fail, but to harm relationships. This ideology extends to customers as well. Different lines of business in the customer’s organization need transparency into their needs and what can add value to their work. A shiny new tool adds no value if it’s misaligned with the organization.

Looking to Succeed

Organizations can’t gamble by throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Instead, focusing on real, lasting solutions to achieve their tech-driven goals will ensure overall success, not short-term wins. Organizations can make this a reality by embracing a business-first mindset in technological development. By fostering thoughtful, cross-functional collaboration and ensuring clear alignment with business goals, they can achieve meaningful ROI. Innovation need not be sacrificed to pressure or inefficient structures; a culture that tightly integrates technology and business delivers stronger, more resilient solutions.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.