Digitization and its skeptics: When the fear of change costs more than the change itself

Slovak companies are standing at a turning point. Customers expect fast and flawless service, the market lacks people, and legislation from 2027 will uncompromisingly change the way companies invoice. The pressure to digitalize has never been stronger.

At the same time, however, there have never been more arguments against it. Studies on failed implementations, reports on the AI bubble, and warnings about cyberattacks are spreading faster than success stories. Let us therefore ask the key question: If the skeptics' arguments are backed by numbers, why shouldn't you listen to them?

The customer doesn't remember your system, they remember how many times they had to call

Imagine a manufacturing enterprise whose production line stops in the early morning hours. The production manager calls the service partner and explains the exact same situation successively to dispatching, the technician, and finally the accounting department, which sends her an erroneous invoice a week later. Yet the service company is doing its job well; it's just that its customer information is scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and the memory of individual people.

According to a Salesforce survey of more than 14,000 customers, 80% of customers consider the experience with a company to be just as important as its product. Salesforce also states that 56% of customers have to repeatedly explain the same information to different people within a single company.

Slovakia has catching up to do in this discipline. The European Commission points out that we have dropped five places to 23rd in corporate digitalization over two years, lagging most in the use of data and cloud. According to Eurostat data, 96% of large enterprises in the EU have a basic level of digitalization, compared to only 71% of small and medium-sized enterprises. Yet the latter form the backbone of the Slovak economy.

Skeptics have numbers, but not the whole story

The most common argument against a new ERP system sounds convincing. Gartner analysts state that 70% of ERP projects completely fail to meet original goals, and a quarter of them fail crucially. The skeptic usually stops reading here. However, analyses of the causes continue further, showing that the culprit is most frequently project management, unclear responsibility, and underestimated change management, not the software itself. Failure is therefore not a feature of ERP, but a consequence of how it is implemented.

The same applies to artificial intelligence. An MIT report stating that 95% of generative AI pilots brought no measurable return on investment flew around the world and became a popular proof of the AI bubble. Less is said about the fact that its conclusion is based on 52 interviews. And almost no one quotes the finding from the same study according to which solutions from external suppliers succeeded in approximately 67% of cases, more than twice as often as internal experiments.

The conclusion is clear. Artificial intelligence as such did not fail; AI detached from the company's processes and data did not fail. It delivers value when it works directly in the system where the company orders, stores, invoices, and serves customers every day.

Cloud, jobs, and carbon footprint: risks with a known solution

Another wave of objections concerns security. According to IBM, the average data leak costs $4.44 million, and 63% of organizations lack established rules for using AI. However, these numbers are a strong argument for professional data management, not against it. In many Slovak companies today, critical data resides on a server in a warehouse and in employees' private email inboxes, without systematic backups and access control. The question is therefore not whether to move to the cloud, but who bears the responsibility for your data.

Concern about jobs is equally understandable. The World Economic Forum estimates that 92 million jobs will disappear by 2030, but 170 million new ones will be created. For Slovak companies, which are currently searching in vain for technicians, accountants, and sales representatives, the problem is not a surplus of people, but their shortage.

The newest argument is ecology. The International Energy Agency expects electricity consumption in data centers to grow from 415 TWh in 2024 to approximately 945 TWh in 2030. A fair balance sheet must also include the other side: unnecessary technician dispatches without the right part, tons of printed paper, and hours of work spent fixing erroneous documents. A modern ERP system also collects this data automatically and gives the company background for ESG reporting, which is becoming a condition for loans and entry into supply chains.

Fear of change and the loss of conceptual vision

If most objections have a known solution, why do companies postpone decisions? The answer rarely lies in the arguments. It lies in the fear of losing what works and in the gradual loss of a conceptual view of one's own company.

Management that has been putting out daily operational fires for years stops seeing the whole. Strategic thinking is replaced by operations, and the question "how to do it better" quietly becomes the question "why should we change anything at all". It is not a question of age, but of whether the company and its leaders maintain an interest in innovation and their own development.

History knows this pattern very well. In 1847, physician Ignaz Semmelweis introduced mandatory hand disinfection with chlorine solution in a Vienna maternity hospital, and maternal mortality dropped from 18% to 2%. Nevertheless, senior physicians rejected his conclusions and attributed the drop to new ventilation. Many were offended by the mere thought that they could be harming patients.

His name is now borne by the Semmelweis effect—the reflexive rejection of knowledge that disrupts established beliefs. If humanity had always listened to skeptics, many of today's matters-of-course would not exist.

The year 2027 will end the debate on whether

The discussion about the meaning of digitalization, however, has a fixed date for its end. Starting January 1, 2027, VAT payers in Slovakia must issue electronic invoices for domestic transactions between businesses and with the state. A PDF invoice sent by email is becoming obsolete.

Invoices will have a structured format, and their standard channel will be the Peppol network. Everyone to whom a supplier is obligated to issue them must be able to receive them, and from July 2030, the obligation will expand to cross-border transactions within the EU. The skeptic can therefore no longer ask whether to change processes. They can only ask how.

This is precisely where the difference shows between a company that merely fulfills an obligation and a company that utilizes it. The new invoice format is just the tip of the iceberg. Real value comes when the company rethinks the entire journey from receiving a customer request through delivery to payment. That is why we at Asseco Solutions have become the Digital Postman in the PEPPOL network and will solve e-invoicing for literally everyone, from a standalone solution to a fully-fledged ERP system.

Employers today are fighting not just for people, but for their time

Digitalization is often evaluated solely through the lens of the customer. Equally important, however, is the employer's perspective. An MIT study highlights a trend where companies increasingly do not fill vacant positions in support and administration, shifting their agendas onto the existing team. Moreover, when an experienced technician or sales rep leaves the company, the customer history they kept in their head or personal spreadsheet leaves with them.

An employer who fails to keep this knowledge in the system pays twice. Once through the loss of customer experience, and a second time through the overload of the people who stayed. The sales rep spends time on administration instead of selling, the technician calls the office instead of repairing, and the accountant rewrites documents instead of analyzing numbers. Every hour of unnecessary manual work is an hour missing for the customer.

It is on this principle that QASIDA is built—our ecosystem of cloud and mobile applications with QASIDA ERP at its core, connected with QASIDA CRM for sales, QASIDA Service for service management, and the QASIDA AI platform. Sales, service, and finance thus work with a single customer history. QASIDA ERP also includes HR functions for managing working hours and capacities, and its own API enabling integration with systems the company already uses. Asseco SPIN customers can transition to QASIDA via a quick migration without starting from scratch.

Technology alone, however, is not enough. According to Eurostat, 40% of EU inhabitants lack even basic digital skills, which is why an inseparable part of implementation is also training conducted in-person, online, and via webinars. A system that people understand and enjoy using is just as strong an argument for an employer in retaining talent as salary or the flexibility of working from anywhere.

The greatest risk is yesterday's logic

Management thinker Peter Drucker captured it in a sentence that holds true today more than ever:

Skeptics ask what all can go wrong during digitalization. The customer asks why it still isn't working. The employee asks why they have to do work that a system could handle for them. A company that listens only to the first question stops hearing the other two.

The true value of digitalization therefore never lay in software as such. It lies in the fact that the customer doesn't have to repeat anything, employees can focus on value-added work, and the company is prepared for the changes yet to come.