Your team has been working around your broken systems for years. They just never told you.
I figured this out the hard way. I tried to hand my calendar and email processes to an AI tool and it could not follow them. Not because the AI was limited. Because the systems were not actually systems. They were 20 years of on-the-fly workarounds held together by a team that had quietly learned to translate my chaos into something functional.
The AI had no such loyalty. It just said, in its very polite way: this does not make sense.
That is the thing nobody tells you about AI automation. The tool does not just expose inefficiency. It exposes the gap between the system you think you have and the one that is actually running. And for a founder who built everything on instinct and will, that gap can be significant.
Fix the system before you automate it. Not because the AI needs you to. Because you finally deserve one that actually works.
What would your team say if you asked them, honestly, which of your processes they secretly work around every day?
Transcription:
We used… And so years ago when I had clients do that, we were figuring out when do they need an assistant, when’s the line, what will they delegate to them? Now, I’m having clients do that, we’re doing that through coaching and stuff, and we’re saying, “Okay, here are the things we’ve identified that are in your weakness.
How much of this can AI automate and, and assist you with and do 80 to 90% of the lift and you proof it? Let’s find out.” So that’s what you ask it next. I’m not kidding you. If you have trained your AI, which means that it understands you, you’ve spent some time, it- it’s gotten to know you, then you can actually put that list of things that you’re like, “I don’t think I should be doing these things.
Not the best use of my time.” You actually type that in and you ask the AI, the prompt is this: “I’ve done a time audit, h- and the results of that time audit, this list of items I should not be doing. They’re not the best. They don’t, you know, make me the most money. I think they’re a big time suck. What on this list could we automate with AI?
What on this list might there be apps and so forth that I could use that would simplify this?” It’s gonna give you responses to that, and then you can say… Then you, then you just pick through that. I work with the clients, we go through that, and then it’s, the next thing is what are three options for automating that?
So you just pick the one. One of the other really, really important things I’ve recognized, a lot of my systems I’ve been using for many years They are crappy. So I do not wanna automate junk. So as I was using Lindy, I’m like, “I need to change my calendaring system. This actually isn’t that effective. I can’t even explain it to this, and this can’t even understand it.”
That’s not a good system. I’m like, “It’s time for that to improve.” Same thing with my email processes.