Use AI to make your business more human

I use AI for nearly all my work. I think problems through with it on the train, I get it to draft things, and I lean on it for legal and HR questions I'd otherwise struggle with. I'd estimate I work about three times faster than I used to.

It has also taught me where it doesn't belong. A lot of owners I talk to feel they need to ""do something with AI"", and the danger I see is pointing it at the wrong work.

Some things should stay with people

I don't want AI talking to my customers or suppliers. I don't want it settling a disagreement in my team, or deciding what to do about a problem we've never seen before. Those are the conversations that build trust, and they need someone who knows the business and cares how it turns out.

As everyone gets access to the same AI tools, I think the businesses that stand out will be the ones that keep the human parts properly human.

Everything else is worth looking at.

Then split the rest in two

Some of what's left is messy. Summarising a long contract, replying to an awkward email, making sense of a pile of customer feedback. The input changes every time and someone has to use judgement. AI is good at this.

The rest needs to happen the same way every time: manual data entry, copying details from one system into another, sending the same reminders each week. You don't want anything improvising here. You want plain, reliable automation, usually with no AI in it at all. It costs less to run, and you can trust it to do the same thing on Monday that it did on Friday.

Why it matters which is which

Put AI on repetitive work and you get small errors that change from one day to the next, so someone ends up checking everything anyway. Put rigid automation on messy work and it breaks the first time something doesn't fit.

Use AI to be more human

Every hour your team spends keying in data or chasing the same reminders is an hour they're not on the phone to a customer or working through a problem together. Take the repetitive work away and they get that time back for the parts of the job only people can do well. Used well, AI is what gives your business room to be more human."