There is a particular kind of inbox I have come to recognise. It belongs to someone who runs a real business, a few dozen people, revenue growing faster than the team, and it contains thirty AI newsletters. Not read, exactly. Skimmed in the car park. Forwarded to themselves with a subject line like “look at this” and then buried by Tuesday.
If that is your inbox, I want to say something before anything else: the newsletters are not the problem, and neither are you. You did the sensible thing. You saw that something important was happening and you tried to keep up with it. The problem is that keeping up and implementing are two different jobs, and you already have a job.
A conversation I had recently
It goes something like this. “We’ve been using AI for a while. People picked it up on their own. Someone drafts emails with it, someone has a clever thing going with spreadsheets. We pay for the company plan. It’s fine. But I know it could be a lot better, and I genuinely cannot find the time to work out how.”
Then, usually a bit quieter: “And I’ve talked to a firm. They wanted to run a discovery phase.”
I have a lot of sympathy for the firm. Discovery is how they de-risk their own work. But I have more sympathy for the person across the table, who did not want a discovery phase. They wanted three things, and they were quite clear about them once I asked.
Someone to filter the noise. Not another summary of the week in AI. Someone who reads all of it so they do not have to, and tells them, in one page a month, what actually changes for a business like theirs. Most weeks the honest answer is “nothing you need to act on”, and that answer is worth paying for, because it is the one that gives them back their car park.
Someone to just do a few things. A standard way for the whole team to use the tools, so the good tricks stop living in three people’s heads. The Monday report that assembles itself instead of eating someone’s Sunday night. The invoice matching that has quietly become a finance person’s whole week. Small, boring, high-return things, done by someone who can actually do them.
Someone who will not overwhelm the business. This one was said with feeling. A lean company cannot absorb a steering committee. The stakeholder set is the CEO, the head of operations and the two or three people closest to the work. Anything that needs more than that is already the wrong shape.
Why “implement” is the hard part
Here is what I think the newsletters get wrong, and I say this as someone who writes things not unlike them. They are about what is possible. The gap in a real business is never what is possible. It is who is going to sit down on a Wednesday afternoon, open the admin console, allow the app, write the one-page setup recipe, walk the finance person through her first routine, and then check back in a fortnight to see whether it stuck.
That is not strategy. It is not even particularly clever. It is a person with the time, the hands and the judgement, who has done it before, and who is not trying to turn it into a programme. The reason it does not happen is that everyone senior enough to be trusted with it is too busy, and everyone junior enough to have the time does not have the standing to change how the finance person works.
One more thing I have learned to say early: the boring project is the right first project. Not the customer-facing chatbot, not the content engine. The weekly report. The supplier invoices. The thing that is done the same way every Monday by someone who would happily never do it again. Those pay for themselves in weeks, they teach you how your systems actually connect, and nobody’s job feels threatened by a report that writes itself.
What I do about it
I have settled into a shape that seems to fit. A short audit first, two weeks, so I understand the systems, the people and the recurring work before I recommend anything. It costs your team minutes, not hours: a ten-minute survey, an optional screen recording, one hour with the key people. Then a findings session with a menu, priced, where you choose. Then whichever of those you chose, done by me, in accounts you own, documented as it goes. And if you want it, a light monthly retainer so someone keeps watching the field on your behalf.
Each step is priced on its own. You decide after each one. Nobody is asked to buy a transformation. I have written up the whole shape if you want the detail.
The honest gotcha: none of this works if the team thinks it is a prelude to cuts. The first thing that has to happen, before any tool is touched, is the leader saying out loud what this is for. I have written separately about that, because it deserves its own page.
If this is your inbox
You might not need me. If you have one person on the team who is already good at this and has half a day a week, give them the standing to change how things are done and get out of their way. That is genuinely the cheapest version.
But if you have the thirty newsletters and no such person, send me the one you forwarded to yourself in March, or the process that eats your Monday, or just a description of the business. I will tell you honestly what is worth doing, what it would cost, and whether it needs me at all. And I will keep it to one page.