AI shouldn’t replace your staff
It should enable them. It should 2x, 5x or 50x their productivity. Staff, and especially good staff, are the most valuable resource in your business, and likely always will be. Stop thinking of AI as a staff member; think of it as an enabler, an augmentation of skillsets.
You want to grow your business, right? Don’t replace your staff with AI. Instead, leverage AI in your tasks and workflows to free up staff time and prevent them having to do mundane work that they hate. This way, they have time for work that directly compounds business growth. Having good, loyal staff combined with good, impactful AI automation is going to spark business growth quicker than you can send five stunningly lowball offers on Marketplace. While you’re sending those offers, your business is scaling because it has a super robust core.
I talk to a lot of business owners who are unexpectedly cutthroat, who want AI in their internal workflows by hook or by crook and they actively want it to replace staff. I’m talking businesses with less than 50 employees. It always takes me by surprise a little how business owners can be that dismissive of their staff, and fail to see any opportunities to funnel them into BD work. We don’t avoid projects that replace staff - we suggest alternatives, but at the end of the day our clients can do what they want to their businesses. But it does feel like a bad idea every time it happens. It feels small-minded and defeatist, not to mention the myriad problems that can come with moving employees on.
In saying that, I don’t think it’s a blanket rule; if you’ve got bad staff who are doing next to nothing, and there are no opportunities for growth, you can and probably should replace them with AI. If they’re doing nothing at all, you don’t even need AI to replace them. However, this generally only happens when a company has a huge headcount and the bad staff have layers of corporate to weasel behind. It’s also a much larger problem that automating a few workflows isn’t going to fix.
Stop thinking of AI as a guillotine to replace staff; think of it as a power tool to unlock staff productivity.
-Fred