What can AI and automation take off your plate?

We stopped asking if AI would take our jobs. Now we're asking what it can take off our plates.

Something changed quietly over the last three years.

When ChatGPT opened to the public on 30 November 2022, it was free, it was easy, and the first reaction from most business owners was fear. 

Will this replace me? 

Will it replace my team? 

Coming off the back of several years of economic pressure and everyone trying to run a business with fewer staff, it landed as a threat not a gift. 

Three and a half years on, that question has largely answered itself. People got on with it.

AI and automation stats 

A recent Semrush survey of 643 US B2B professionals shows where attention has landed. 

84% now use AI at work. Researching topics and trends tops the list at 72%, followed by writing or editing content at 63% and data analysis or summarisation at 60%. Only 14% describe themselves as still testing to see what’s possible.

The statistic I keep coming back to, though, is automating tasks: 41%.

Four in ten are already handing repeatable work to a machine. That figure is low relative to the others, and that is exactly why it matters. Research, writing and summarising are things you do with AI, sitting there, prompt by prompt. 

Automation is work that happens whether you’re at your desk or not. It is the difference between a faster tool and a bigger business and it’s where I expect the real development over the next five to ten years.

We aren’t going to be replaced by machines. We’re going to use machines to do more. That’s not a revolution; it’s the ordinary shape of technological evolution.

We’ve been here before

When the World Wide Web opened up to the public in the early nineties, the sceptics were loud and specific. Clifford Stoll wrote a Newsweek column in February 1995 dismissing online shopping, telecommuting and internet journalism as “baloney”. The idea that we’d soon buy books and newspapers over the internet was, he said, nonsense. In 1998 the economist Paul Krugman predicted that by 2005 it would be clear the internet’s impact on the economy had been “no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Both were credible people, and both were spectacularly wrong, not because they misjudged the technology, but because they underestimated how thoroughly ordinary people would fold it into their working day.

If you can have a tool that frees up your time, helps when you’re staring at a blank page, or teaches you something you didn’t know how to do,  why wouldn’t you take advantage of it?

Yes, there are pitfalls with AI and automation but there are also pitfalls in running a business without AI and automation. The biggest one is key-person risk: when someone leaves, the process leaves with them. Every workaround, every quirk, every “oh, Sarah always does it that way” walks out of the door. Automating and documenting your work is future-proofing, not just efficiency.

2 things to make AI and automation work 

Before you buy any tools or software, you have to understand the two things that will determine if AI and automation will work in your business. 

First: Workflow

You have to understand your workflow. Every single step of it, including the bits you do automatically without thinking. You need to know the exact step-by-step process for everything you do. The little workaround you invented two years ago that you’ve never mentioned to anyone. Automation only works on steps you can name. This is the crucial bit, and it’s where most attempts fail. People automate the version of the process they think they run, not the one they actually run.

Second: Data location

You have to know where your data is. In business, we say you only know what you know. AI has exactly the same problem. It only knows what you tell it. 

Think of it as a big black box. The more you put into it, the more the AI has to work with. Organise what’s in there into different coloured boxes, for example clients here, finances there, operations in another and you control who and what has access to which box, while everything stays secure. 

Understand that principle and the scope for automating tasks is effectively endless.

AI and automation opportunity 

There is a real gap opening up here, and it isn’t technical. It’s for people who understand processes and workflow analytics. The person who can sit as a bridge between the IT person who knows the techy stuff and the time-poor business owner who knows the work but has never written it down.

Because the underlying idea isn’t new. “If this, then that” rules, a trigger causes an action automatically, with no human in the middle, have been available to small businesses since IFTTT launched in 2011 and Zapier followed a year later. Set up a rule so that when a form is submitted, a record is created, an email goes out and a task appears on someone’s list. That’s it. That’s automation.

What’s changed is that AI has made those rules dramatically easier to build and cheap enough for any business owner to run. You no longer need a developer to connect two systems or to handle the messy, unstructured middle bit.

My prediction on AI and Automation

More and more businesses will start to lean on task automation. The businesses that don’t will fall behind the ones that do. It won’t happen overnight, but steadily, in margins, in response times, in the sheer volume of work they can carry.

Start with the workflow. Not the tool.

Sources: Semrush, “How AI tools shape the B2B buying process” (survey of 643 US B2B professionals); Clifford Stoll, “The Internet? Bah!”, Newsweek, 27 February 1995; Paul Krugman, Red Herring, June 1998.