Ignoring It or Winging It

There are two ways to get AI wrong. Most owners I know are doing one of them.

Either they've decided it doesn't apply to their business, so they ignore it.

Or they bought a few tools and they're winging it with no real plan.

I see both every week, and I want to be fair to both, because each one comes from a reasonable instinct that's aimed at the wrong target.

The ignorers

The owners avoiding it aren't wrong that half the hype doesn't fit them. It doesn't. If you run a plumbing company or a machine shop, most of what gets shouted about AI online has nothing to do with your Tuesday.

Where they're wrong is concluding that none of it does. Somewhere in their week, and usually somewhere in every employee's week, is work a machine should already be handling. The quote that takes forty minutes to assemble from three systems. The follow-up emails that don't get sent. The report someone builds by hand every Monday.

Ignoring the category because the hype is annoying means paying people to do machine work indefinitely. The hype being wrong doesn't make the tool useless. It just makes the loudest advice useless.

The wingers

The owners winging it have the opposite issue. Tools open, subscriptions active, nothing underneath.

They bought the thing because they felt the pressure to do something, and now AI helps them do the busywork faster instead of clearing busywork off their plate entirely. That's the tell, by the way. If the tool made you faster at a task you shouldn't be doing at all, it didn't help you. It anesthetized you.

Winging it feels like progress because there's motion. But pointing powerful tools at an undefined operation just produces undefined results at a higher speed.

The question that fixes both

Here's the thing. Neither one is a tool problem, so no tool fixes it.

The thing that actually moves the needle isn't the model. It's the call about where to point it. And that call comes down to one question you can answer with a legal pad:

What in your business can only you do, and what have you just never handed off?

Sit with that honestly and the two lists come apart fast. The "only I can do this" list is shorter than you think. Everything else is a candidate for a person or a machine, and once the job is defined, the tools almost pick themselves.

The ignorers discover there's real work worth handing over. The wingers discover the reason the tools weren't landing. Same question, both cured.

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So which one are you right now: ignoring it, or winging it?