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
Over-automation
How much automation is too much? You’d expect us to say that there’s no limit - it’ll help us get more sales, right? However, I believe that it’s possible to over-automate a business to the point that it’s hog-tied by software.
Hear me out; good automation absolutely helps a business scale, and scale dramatically. Automating mundane and repetitive tasks and workflows is going to free up your staff to focus on more business growth-adjacent activities. It means that you can make more money without having to recruit and employ. Good automation and software allows a business to rocket forward without distraction. Though, there are still some tasks and workflows that a human should be doing.
Customer service is the obvious big one. If my [looks around room for inspiration] suitcase shat the bed, and I called the suitcase company, and an AI agent answers the phone, I would honestly just give up and buy a new suitcase from another suitcase shop. People hate talking to AI agents, especially over the phone. AI just isn’t intuitive enough yet to outperform a human in customer service. Sure, replacing your reception and customer service with AI is going to save your business a huge expense. But it’ll cost your business exponentially more in client dissatisfaction, mistrust and eventually, lost sales.
(I know suitcases are a terrible example. Good thing it doesn’t matter.)
Another example is industry- or company-specific software, the stuff that electronics, machines and robots use. Take a laser cutter machine; its manufacturer will have programmed it to do X when you hit the X button. It likely comes with software that’s installed on a PC to adjust shapes and specs, run reporting, and keep it up to date with industry standards. It’s important to have somebody that knows as much as possible about this software, to maximise the machine’s output and champion any issues with it. The automating of industry or company-specific software removes the need for this expertise, so the laser cutter machine is going to be pretty stuffed if something goes wrong.
Automation is great, but it’s going to deskill your staff as they forget the workflow over time. However, if it’s a mundane and repetitive workflow, that doesn’t matter. If it’s a customer-facing workflow or includes skills that are indispensable to a role, you’re best to think twice.
-Fred
How we automate stuff
Good automation feels like magic. It’s identifying a thing that you’re doing manually, and designing a workflow to make it happen in the background so you never have to think about it again. There are heaps of different ways to do this; it depends on the complexity of the task, your software stack and the level of intuition.
If you can explain how you do a task step-by-step, it can be automated. For example, keying a sales order. The email from the client arrives, then this happens:
Identify the client
Identify the order details (number, date, lines etc)
Open your sales order software
Click to add a new sales order
Enter the client and order details from the email
Save the sales order
Attach the order pdf
Email order confirmation to the client
Notify the warehouse for picking
See how every step in the process is literally just clicking your mouse a bunch of times? If you can get this granular when automating a task, you’re going to have a super robust and reliable automation. You can set this up using middleware like Zapier or Make, or an existing integration if your software supports it. If your software doesn’t natively integrate with middleware, you can set it up using webhooks triggers and API calls. There are very few bits of software these days that don’t have API - if you’re using something that doesn’t have API, you’ve likely got bigger problems (you are probably but a humble serf harvesting grain for your lord in the year 500).
If you can explain how you do the task step-by-step, but it requires human intuition to make a calculated decision at some point in the process, it probably requires AI to be automated. An example of this is drafting email replies. If you’ve got your money up and don’t need to do business anymore, you can email however you want. The rest of us have to observe email etiquette and make sure we’re coming across correctly. This requires human intuition to write in a way that expresses the correct tone and sentiment for the situation. You can say whatever you want if you’re emailing your work mate, but not if you’re trying to convince a CEO to commit to your tender application. That’s where AI comes in - it’s not human, but it’s generally intelligent enough to detect the sentiment and intent in an email chain, look at any prior correspondence with the victim, and draft a reply to match.
Almost any task on a computer can be automated. We’re experts at deciding the best way to do it.
-Fred
Automation isn’t nuclear
It can be. It can be tiny. Automation is whatever size you want it to be. It’s like the Lego cars we built years ago; some were tiny and included only the bare essentials to operate as a car, while some were gigantic and used every brick in the box and operated not only as a car but also a rocket ship and a luxury motor home.
I talk to heaps of business owners because they are generally the decision makers. A lot of them don’t want to engage with us because automation in their heads is too large, too confronting and too much like the Lego rocket cruise liner chinook submarine. Don’t get me wrong, it can be that. You can stop business for a month and get every internal system automated. However, this isn’t realistic for most businesses. Unless you sell stuff that no one wants. Then you can realistically stop business for any amount of time. With that in mind, we don’t recommend it to anyone, even if they want to. Good automation involves starting as small as possible and building on it. Good automation means identifying a tiny, two-step task that happens constantly, and setting it up to happen in the background. Good automation means pinpointing one process/workflow that your staff HATE, and asking an automation specialist (who, us?) to engineer it.
Automation is a drug. When you automate one process, your eyes open to see other processes that you never knew could be automated. That’s why we encourage our prospects to think up one eminently basic workflow, then we set it up to happen in the background, then they identify a second workflow to automate. Eventually, our partnership balloons into that Lego bullet train lawnmower rocket ship.
Ironically, your business becomes a bullet train because your staff are freed up to work on stuff that actually makes a difference.
-Fred
‘we need to get AI in our business’
AI is everywhere today. Every piece of software you use has jumped aboard the AI train and now offers an AI service, whether that’s a chatbot assistant (most common), AI-powered navigation, writing suggestions, meeting recordings and more. AI being forced down our throats by the software we use. it’s got to the point that the majority of businesses are looking to integrate it in their business, literally for the only reason that they want to keep up with the crowd.
So is it a good idea to get AI in your business, and what’s the best way of going about it?
I’ll start with a disclaimer - I hate two things:
AI-powered services being forced on me. I’d like to pick and choose which ones I want to use. Generally, it’s too underdeveloped to hold any use for me. It’s like that one drunk dude at the party who laughs too loud and keeps telling the same story (not taking high ground, I’ve been that). They think they are adding value but really they are just shredding any credibility/aura.
People bandwaggoning to get AI in their business. It’s new and shiny and the future and everybody is getting it and what if I miss out? They don’t know what they want it to do, they just want to get it.
In saying that, it’s incredibly powerful when used correctly. If you’re using chatGPT or Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok or Claude (the list goes on) as an SME (subject matter expert), you’re using it correctly. If you’re using your AI chat to ask what to eat for lunch or to write a bunch of code, you’re using it correctly. If you’re asking it for the meaning of life or to proof-read an email, you’re using it correctly. These are all examples of how AI can make your life a hell of a lot easier. Personally, it’s most impactful for me when it’s writing code or telling me which earbuds to buy (Shokz). It regularly saves me literal days on identifying bugs in lines of code or telling me where to find a setting toggle for a function that has been rage baiting me.
In my experience with providing automation services for businesses, people want AI but they don’t know what they want it for. When they identify a workflow to automate, they’ll ask me how can they use AI to automate it. Here’s some news: AI isn’t the answer 90% of the time. AI is unpredictable, unhinged and unfiltered. It’s slow, time-consuming and extremely expensive compared to hard-coded programming or middleware.
I’ll make it make sense in a badly formatted pivot table I made (it takes too long to format):
| Thing | Human | AI | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | Decent | Decent | Lightning quick |
| Reliability | Good | Really good | Perfect |
| Availability | Okay | Really good | Perfect |
| Versatility | Great | Perfect | Terrible |
| Consistency | Bad | Almost perfect | Perfect |
| Takes sick days | On occasion | Never | Never |
| Can you mess with it | Of course | No | No |
| Cost | Enormous | Big | Tiny |
This post is dragging on a little, but tl/dr: don’t assume you need AI in your business. Sure, it can automate your workflows. But 90% of the time, there are better options.
-Fred