Stop Asking What AI Saves You. Ask What Work You Hate.

Full episode transcript

Stop asking what AI will save you and start asking what work you hate. I sat down with a bunch of new clients this week, and with ownership and a few key people in their organizations who are already using AI or working on implementing AI workflows into the business. And when I ask them what they actually want AI to do, almost nobody can answer. That is not a knock on them. The question everybody taught them to open with is the wrong one. These are not people who have never touched it. They have ideas. They have fiddled around with it and had it make a few things for them. Some of them have systems running that string together a few different actions at a time, and those systems work. So the blank stare is not ignorance about the tool. They know what it can do. They cannot say where it should go next inside their own company. Here is why I think that happens. The question they have been trained to ask is how does this save the next dollar. How does this save time. How does this save money. I asked that question for a long time myself. It sounds rigorous and it produces nothing, because it is abstract. Nobody walks around their business carrying a mental list of dollars waiting to be saved. You ask it, and you get a pause and a guess. So I stopped opening with it. Now I ask which process here hurts the most. Which database. Which part of this company do people dread. Where is the time actually going, and where is it getting wasted. Those questions are not abstract. Everybody in the room already knows what hurts, even if they have never put a number on it. And the answers come fast. Then we drill. Not what hurts in general, but which step, which handoff, which person is stuck doing the same thing every week. The more time we spend on that, the more they start to recognize this is not only a good conversation to have for AI implementation. It is a good conversation for them, period. It stops being about software and starts being about how the business actually runs. What I have found is that the meeting almost works better as a clarity session for ownership and leadership than as an AI scoping call. It lets them put a label on maybe the most pressing thing in the business. Not a vague sense that things are heavy. A name. This process. This handoff. This pile of work nobody wants to own. Once it has a name, somebody can actually go work on it. Every business owner I know understands this drift. You can drift away from what is actually the most important thing to work on, or the most important thing to avoid. Not because you are lazy. Because the urgent thing keeps showing up and the important thing does not have a deadline. Sitting down and answering where the time is going drags that back into the open, whether or not you ever deploy a single system. And I want to be honest that I did not walk in with this. I walked in with the savings framework. Save the next dollar. Save the time. Save the money. That framework is not wrong. It is just downstream. You find the savings after you find the pain. If you lead with the savings, you never find the pain, and you end up automating whatever happens to be easiest to measure. I have spent some time with nonprofits lately, and that is where this cracked open for me. I was with one yesterday, and they said something I had kind of been thinking in my head but never really spelled out. I think it may become my mode of operating and my North Star in this work. And it has nothing to do with the next dollar. It is this. Businesses, organizations, and individuals can use AI and AI systems to remove the boring, monotonous, crappy work so they can spend more time being human in their work and in their life. That is the whole thing. Saving money is not always the most important thing to an organization or a person, and acting like it is has been quietly steering this work in the wrong direction. Once you hold that as the goal, the sequencing changes. You are not hunting for the cheapest task to automate. You are hunting for the work that is stealing hours from the part of the job that actually requires a person. Sometimes those are the same target. Often they are not. And when they are not, I would rather take the one that gives somebody their week back. This is what I keep harping on in most of these videos. Over the next few years people are going to implement systems, and what matters is whether those systems leave the human element alone where it is most important. The face-to-face, highly critical moments. A therapy session. A class. A face-to-face tutoring session. A meeting with a new customer. Those do not get better with a machine in the chair. What should get eaten is everything around those moments. Putting together the packet. Researching a new company. Analyzing the data to figure out what it actually says. That is hours a week, and none of it is the part anybody trained for. Take that off somebody's plate and they do not lose their job. They get more of the job they signed up for. That is why I think this absolutely ends up becoming a public benefit, and I suspected it would. Not because the technology is noble. Because of where the freed-up time goes. More minutes inside the therapy session. More attention in the classroom. More real preparation before somebody sits down with a new customer. Multiply that across enough organizations and it stops being an efficiency story. So the money question is not wrong. It is just the wrong thing to lead with. Go straight at the work people hate, the boring, monotonous, crappy work that everybody in the building can name in about four seconds, and you end up pointed at the savings anyway. You just get there having fixed something that was actually hurting.