How to Strengthen Your Business with AI

AI didn't save their time. It magnified their chaos…. A SaaS founder reached out frustrated. They’d invested in multiple AI tools, but instead of streamlined workflows, they got: ↳ Confused team members ↳ Tasks lost between systems ↳ Missed follow-ups with clients They thought AI would be a shortcut. But it just accelerated what was already broken. Here’s what we did instead: 1. Mapped their actual workflows: We started with WHAT WAS ALREADY WORKING and flagged the friction points. 2. Identified repeatable tasks: These are the parts AI thrives in; SOPs, client onboarding sequences, follow-ups. 3. Integrated AI with intention: Instead of slapping tools everywhere, we matched tools to their process. not the other way around. Result? In 3 weeks: ✅ Client onboarding time was cut by 30% ✅ Internal communication improved dramatically ✅ Their ops lead finally said: “This is the first time it feels manageable.” AI didn’t fix their business But systems did. And AI helped scale them, once the foundation was in place. If you’re a small business owner trying to make AI work without making a mess… I created a free guide to help you Integrate AI into Your Operations the right way, with structure and intention. Link is in the comment section below. This is exactly what I help small business owners and operational leaders do, make AI work WITH their systems, not against them. #systems #leadership #business #strategy #ProcessImprovement 

Yesterday, I helped my client begin to add an extra $80K in profit this year. Growing a business is HARD. With so many moving parts, it's tough to identify and fix problem areas limiting your potential. I recently helped a video production agency owner struggling with this. Despite a talented team and consistent work, he felt trapped working IN his business instead of ON it. There were just too many manual, repetitive tasks that kept him chained to his desk. Here are the 4 steps we took to help him grow faster: 1️⃣ Identified areas of “operational waste”. I had him walk through his entire production workflow from start to finish. It revealed over a dozen clunky processes - from creating GDrive folders to sending Notion/Slack status updates to posting deliverables. These manual tasks created friction that slowed down operations and hindered growth. 2️⃣ Prioritized the biggest pain points. Next, we estimated potential time/money savings for each inefficient process. This made it easy to pick the low-hanging fruit - things like data entry, reporting, and internal notifications. Fixing those would free up 20+ hours/week for higher-level creative work. 3️⃣ Defined the role of his AI-powered “Employee”. Using the insights from 1 and 2, I mapped out every job that his AI-powered helper would have. We gave it job responsibilities like: ✔️ Automating folder creation ✔️ Sending project status notifications ✔️ Posting finished videos to correct channels Screenshot of just some of these workflows below. 4️⃣ Built and launched the AI prototype. I set up AI Automations for the urgent tasks first. We tested them for a week before expanding the AI Employee's duties. After a few rounds of feedback and tuning, our AI helper was fully deployed yesterday. 📌 All of these steps were taken strategically to ensure we were adding the most value possible, in the shortest amount of time. And now, because we took a structured approach, he’s got an AI-powered Employee working 24/7/365 in the background. Helping him grow faster at all times. And adding $80K in profit while we’re at it. Man, I love go-live day. --- Want to install an AI-powered Employee in your business? Click my name above, and DM me “Growth” to learn more about how I can help. 🔝

Staying in the A.I. race and picking a path to win: the past week has once again seen breakneck announcements of A.I. capabilities. The major players in the tech sector are showing their latest - from #Microsoft #CoPilot general release date, to #Salesforce #EinsteinAI, to #Google #Bard's new integrations. #Amazon's $4b investment in #Anthropic, and #OpenAI's just announced audio and video 'prompt' capabilities - all are influencing business choices and transforming corporate strategies and models in a race for new leadership. The fundamental question I ask (and get ask) often: "How can I leverage this to my business' benefit (ethically)?)" In short - how and where are the sweet spots for use, and why. And the answers are as diverse as the industries and models they rush to replace. From transportation / route optimizations to airline rewards program scenarios (try that as a prompt to come up with a new model for both flyers and providers), to medical claims processing - all are data-rich (and complex) business models - and each will have a different set of scenarios / data / conditions and outcomes. So what are the fundamentals? My best answers (so far): - Know your business / customer and what you are providing to them fundamentally (a service, a product, a solution, an experience). Decide if you want to enhance, replace, or transform that with more insights, anticipated for the customer. While this is so fundamental to mention - A.I. helps you expedite what you do already. - Identify the key data elements - and the sources of that data -to continously check, educate the A.I. on, and verify fidelity of that information. Bad data leads to hallucinations, which result in bad (and risk filled) outcomes. - Focus on outcomes and evolutions of those for your customers (internal or otherwise). If you want a customer to experience, utilize your product, or engage your service differently - focus on the outcome scenarios and build guide rails within the A.I. (LLM or otherwise) - to limit to those. - Commit to a journey of exploration to commercialization (and rinse and repeat) - The process of design thinking is a good conceptual framework to approach A.I. business transformations. Do not think 'we have always done it that way, or budget allows XYZ' scenarios to be the limits of potential change. New ways of serving customers (and revenue potential / margin enhancement) - come as you set aside the historic. This is not a one and done journey - it is continous (if you allow it to be). A.I. speeds up the journey from ideation to commerce, but does not replace the important steps between. - Use A.I. to be a time machine: probably the best advice I heard lately was think of your A.I. capabilities as a time saving solution - helping team members focus on the most important things that customers need insights, ideas, and outcomes (photo from Dall-E produced this morning via prompt)

Over the past few months, I've had the privilege of speaking at various conferences and engaging in deep conversations with customers, colleagues and partners about leveraging generative AI in business. It's clear that we're on the cusp of a transformative era, but amidst this rapid evolution, a critical focus emerges: the need for strategic prioritization and road mapping. 🔍 Key Insights: Augment Employee Productivity: There is so much noise in the market on what Gen AI can do. Some of it is real and some of it is aspirational. The foremost step for businesses is to identify and prioritize use cases where AI can realistically and significantly boost productivity. It’s not just about adopting technology; it's about integrating it in a way that replaces manual overhead in existing workflows and augments workforce productivity. Business-Specific Embedded AI: When it comes to generative AI in business, success lies in tailoring it to address unique business challenges. Embedding AI into enterprise products and services (at the business process level) can unlock unprecedented value, driving not just efficiency but also innovation. Advanced Industry specific use cases: Beyond the basics, there is a growing need for providers of technology to create domain/industry specific models with built in enterprise intelligence and benchmarking. 💡 The Bottom Line: As we navigate this exciting landscape, the key for leaders is not just to invest in AI but to invest wisely. It's about identifying where AI aligns with your business goals and how to build a roadmap to addresses short term and long terms goals. It is also important to understand your vendors AI ethics policy along with their data privacy and protection policy to understand if your vendor’s AI is responsible, reliable and relevant. 🤝 I would love to hear from you on how you are integrating generative AI into your business strategy? Reach out to discuss more about the future we're building together! #GenerativeAI #BusinessTransformation #AIstrategy #Innovation