What to Automate
One of our priorities this year is to adopt – and to help our portfolio companies adopt – AI to make our daily grind more efficient and effective. And with AI tools getting better and cheaper every day, that seems like a worthy and achievable goal.
A good question to ask, however, is where to start. After all, since it seems like AI can be helpful with almost anything, there’s a temptation to try to sic it on your biggest, highest profile problems and opportunities. Yet many remain skeptical or fearful of the technology and if you ask it to do too much too soon, early failures might delay or even doom its adoption by an organization.
To that end, our CEO Brent shared with our team an AI implementation playbook for SMBs that he received from a friend that made some compelling points. Specifically, it recommends that SMBs (1) Start small with specific use case that can show quick wins on a limited budget; (2) Identify and empower a few “AI Champions” inside an organization that will be early adopters of the tools and be willing to show others how to use them; and (3) Track progress against practical metrics such as adoption rate and time saved. Now, these tactics aren’t rocket science and are good guidance for how to introduce anything new, but they’re particularly important to remember in this case given the aforementioned temptation with AI to do something radical.
But I heard another interesting framework the other day for how to think about technology and automation from a gentleman who spent decades running an industrial plant. He said that the first or next job to automate is the one you’re embarrassed to have to show a new employee how to do. And while his context was hold-your-nose tasks like pressure washing sludge off of rake screens, embarrassing jobs and processes exist in every organization. For example, until Danny worked with BUCS Analytics to automatically pull our portfolio company financials into custom dashboards, it was embarrassing how much time we asked people to spend here at Permanent Equity manually transferring numbers from PDFs into spreadsheets. I mean, imagine handing a highly qualified new financial partner an abacus on his or her first day instead of a computer.
So what are you embarrassed to ask other people to do? Because when it comes to automation, that seems a great place to start. See you Friday.
– Tim
