How to add value in a world of AI

I’ve been talking to a client recently who keeps identifying more and more opportunities for automation in his business. After all, automation is a drug. He’s also super hooked on Anthropic’s Claude, his AI bot of choice. As we find more stuff to automate in his business, he keeps defaulting to Claude as the solution and building automated workflows via Claude, all the time with zero clue what it’s doing. This introduces an awkward dynamic for us; he wants to keep costs down by avoiding our services and doing automation in-house, which is fair enough, but 90% of the time Claude doesn’t have the best solution. He’s constantly beating a dead horse to spit out inflated, unintelligible workflows that don’t holistically achieve his goals.

AI is incredibly powerful for writing code snippets, locating bugs and brainstorming ideas. It’s terrible at identifying the best solution for automation. It’ll soak up heaps of time and tokens to set up a workflow, then require babying through every time it runs. Back in reality, you can ask it to write an entire Python script to run instead, which is completely free, instant and doesn’t break all the time.

I can write code in heaps of languages, but why would I? An AI bot can do that for me. We add value by knowing the best solution for your automation opportunities, and default to engaging as little AI as possible to keep logic high and costs low. We add value by putting intelligible code in intelligible places. Our expertise is valuable to people who want the best end-to-end solution, not a tacky trellis that kills scalability.

People with good oversight of AI are 100x more valuable than people who use AI for everything, and 1000x more valuable than people who don’t use it at all.

It’s actually pretty hard to quantify our value in that area without being speculative. I realised that while writing this blog. Perhaps try AI for yourself first, and let us know when it shits the bed.

-Fred