AI will NOT replace your employees, but leaders who believe in magic (treating AI as a magical tool) may unknowingly damage the very reason their business is worth selecting.
I recently spoke with one of my founder friends, Excited Founder: “We are currently using AI for all aspects of our company. We have automated content creation; customer support; proposal development. The cost savings have been enormous!”
Me: “How has this impacted your company?”
Excited Founder: “It has worked incredibly well… at least for us. However, two of our clients have expressed concern that we seem less invested in our relationship with them due to the new automation tools that have reduced the need for human interaction.”
Three weeks after expressing his initial enthusiasm, the same founder reached out to me again: “Two of our clients have left, and both told us that they feel we are phoning in our services now that we use AI to automate so much.”
This is the mistake that every leader is making.
AI can complete the tasks. However, AI cannot determine if those tasks are truly important.
What Most Leaders Are Misunderstanding
Leaders are asking, “What can we automate using AI?”, but the better question would be, “What will become MORE valuable simply because AI cannot perform it?”
For example, think about the following.
- AI creates decent blog posts at an unprecedented speed. Your team could never produce content faster than AI does. Nevertheless, AI has absolutely no ability to identify changes in your client’s tone in their last email or understand what such changes mean.
- AI analyses data perfectly. Nevertheless, AI has no way of determining which patterns actually matter to your organisation, and why.
- AI produces excellent proposal documents. Nevertheless, AI has no idea how to assess the room during negotiations and decide when to continue pushing or to remain silent.
What Matters Today
Judgment – identifying which AI outputs are gold, which are garbage, and which are off the mark entirely.
Context – understanding the elements that are missing from the data — relationships with clients; internal team dynamics; market timing that is only possible by being physically present.
Strategic Thinking – AI performs optimisation based on the instructions provided to it. AI does not evaluate whether the optimisation process is optimising for the correct goals.
Human Connection – your client remains loyal to you because they trust you to care about their business. They do not remain loyal to you because of how quickly you produce results with your automation tools.
Do not replace people with no understanding as to how much value their contributions added to an organisation’s productivity and/or success (beyond completing tasks).
A Junior employee that is described as “Just doing Admin” may be responsible for identifying trends or issues within a client’s payment patterns which could allow for early detection of potential problems; AI would not identify these types of trends or issues. Just because the AI produces an output quickly does not mean it is sufficient.
I have reviewed several proposal submissions that technically were complete and accurate yet were not suitable for the client. The AI produced the proper formatting however was unable to determine the client’s relationship to the submission. Do not automatically scale the items that are not scalable.
Automating personalised client communication is simply automating communication at high volumes, and the clients will know the difference.
What To Actually Do
Use AI for the monotonous and time-consuming tasks so your team can focus on the valuable aspects of providing services to clients.
Invest in training your team members in the areas of Judgment, Contextual Thinking and Strategic Thinking, the skills that AI cannot provide or replicate. Use AI to handle the volume of work and let your team handle the nuances of each client’s needs.
That Part I Lie!
It is not that AI will create job loss. It is that leadership will inadvertently utilise AI to commoditise the very aspects of their organisation that created differentiation.
Your competitor acquires the exact same AI tools available tomorrow. The same ChatGPT. The same automation solutions. The same everything. However, they will not acquire the knowledge, experience and expertise of your team in terms of Judgment. Understanding of clients. Strategic instincts developed over many years.
If you allow AI to make all of the decisions (and therefore remove your team from decision making) you will ultimately train your employees to lose those very abilities.