A week ago I had the pleasure of attended a fantastic presentation at Daniel Kite‘s Workuity Biltmore location by Yaseen Arshad. Yaseen’s presentation was spot on about how AI can play a major role in companies looking to scale. One point that hit close to home was when Yaseen reminded the audience that AI is a tool not your business.
I see it constantly now, every week another post telling us AI is coming for our teams, our jobs and even our businesses. The headlines seem to scream it dailyand here on LinkedIn it seems to be one of the only conversations of late and yet somewhere lost in all this noise, business owners are making real decisions based on fear instead of strategy.
I’ve had many discussions lately with clients, potential clients, partners, and colleagues about this and I need to clear something up: AI is not the future of your business. You, the leader, are the future of your business. AI is a tool.
The Big Misconception
Here’s the story a lot of business owners are being sold right now: build enough automation, plug in enough AI, and eventually you won’t need people. Basically, the dream of a business that runs itself, minus the payroll.
It’s a seductive idea if you’ve never actually run a real business (or are selling AI as the “end-all-be-all”). This whole concept falls apart the second you are in the trenches actually running a business and dealing with real people.
As I work with more entrepreneurs in scaling their businesses, I’ve come to learn that it is not the lack of tools that is the issue when growing a business. It’s the lack of direction, processes, systems, accountability structures, defined strategy, and most of all leadership. Without these, entrepreneurs are a boat adrift at sea with no sail, no rudder, no map, and haphazardly finding wins when they can.
AI doesn’t fix this, it can’t. All AI does, at the current point, is research your issues and try to provide context from the internet on how to solve your problem. AI can’t fix your internal business strife and chaos. You can’t automate away poor leadership, strategy, clarity, mission or purpose. You can’t automate chaos and expect clarity to come out the other side. All it does is get you faster chaos.
What AI Actually Is
AI is leverage. Nothing more, nothing less.
It’s a tool that takes the grinding, repetitive, soul-draining parts of a workday and clears them off the table and it does it FAST.
It’s a valuable tool; but, leverage without direction just moves you faster in whatever direction you were already headed. If your S.O.P.s are a mess, AI will help you make that mess more efficient. If your culture is weak, AI will not build one for you, it will only expose more problems in your culture as chaos runs rampant.
The businesses winning with AI right now aren’t the ones asking “what can we automate away;” they’re asking a completely different and more valuable question:
“Now that this task doesn’t eat three hours of someone’s day, what do we do with those three hours?”
Where the Time Should Go
This is the part most entrepreneurs skip when a tool works as it should (whether that’s AI, your CRM, your marketing automation, etc.). The time you get back from automation isn’t profit sitting in a drawer; it’s reinvestment.
It needs to go to three places:
Back into the customer. Invest the time in that follow-up call that used to get rushed or the consultation that used to get cut short because the calendar was slammed. Or the relationship-building that made your clients trust you in the first place before the business got big enough to make you too busy for it.
Back into the business. Invest back into building stronger strategies. Back into the stuff owners say they never have time for: refining the offer, tightening the S.O.P.s, actually looking at the numbers instead of reacting to them, and most important taking time to become a better leader. Working on the business instead of getting steamrolled by the business.
Back into the team. Invest in actual ownership over higher-value work instead of the busywork AI removed from your team’s plate. Invest in leadership development, new skills training, defining culture for you team. This investment builds a team that isn’t looking for the quick exit when things get tough.
This only happens when a leader makes a decision about where the reclaimed time goes. AI creates the space for more time; you have to fill it with something meaningful.
The Reality of the Situation
If you’re running a business and you’re eyeing AI as your ticket to running things with fewer people, you’re solving the wrong problem. The gap in your business isn’t headcount, it’s usually poor leadership, poorly executed or communicated strategy, under-developed processes, and lack or no accountability from leadership down. Adding AI on top of a broken system just gets you an even more broken system.
Used right, AI is one of the best tools we’ve ever had to help founders reach more of their goals and aspirations to be the CEO leaders they have dreamed of. It strips out the grunt work that keeps owners trapped in their business, and it hands back hours that should go straight into the three things that actually build a company: the people you serve, the systems you run on, and the team you couldn’t do it without.
I’ve been preaching it for a long time, well before AI, tools don’t build businesses; leaders do. AI is just a new and better tool – what you build with it is still on you.