AI Won’t Save Your Business. But It Will Expose What’s Broken About It - EP # 266

The Truth About AI Nobody Is Talking About

Everyone is rushing to implement AI. Automate the emails. Automate the onboarding. Automate the follow-ups. And yes, AI is a genuinely powerful tool. 

I use it in my own business, and I teach my clients how to use it well.

But here's what I think we're not talking about enough.

AI doesn't fix a broken business. It exposes one. And if you automate what's already broken, AI will make those problems move faster, and at a larger scale.

In this episode, I'm sharing five things AI is going to expose in your business, and what you need to fix before you start automating anything.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

The biggest misconception about AI — why "what can AI do for me?" is the wrong first question, and what to ask instead.

5 things AI will expose in your business - listen to find out what they are

5 questions to ask yourself before you automate anything — a practical framework for knowing whether your business is actually ready.

Accelerator vs. multiplier — the distinction that will change how you think about AI entirely.

What a business worth owning actually looks like — and why that's the real conversation AI is forcing us to have.

The Key Idea to Take Away

AI amplifies what's already there. Great process plus AI equals great process, faster. Broken process plus AI equals broken process, faster. The businesses that will benefit most from AI aren't the ones with the most sophisticated tools — they're the ones with clean data, clear processes, defined ownership, and strong foundations.

This Episode Is For You If...

• You're thinking about implementing AI in your business but aren't sure where to start
• You feel like your business is growing but getting messier at the same time
• You're the bottleneck in your business and everything runs through you
• You want to build something that works — with or without AI

Happy listening!

Transcript

 [00:00:00] Imagine that tomorrow you could hire five new people for your business. They don't sleep, they don't take vacations, they can research, write, analyze information, respond to customers, create reports, follow up with leads, document processes, and help you automate repetitive work, and they cost a fraction of what a full-time employee would cost you.

Sounds like a dream, right? That's essentially the promise of AI, and I absolutely believe AI is going to transform the way small business operate because I do see it in my own business, I've been using AI for the past couple years, and in the business of my clients when I teach them how to use it well.

But here is the part I think we're not talking about enough: AI will not save your business. In fact, I [00:01:00] think AI is going to expose what's broken about your business faster than anything we've seen before. And sometimes if you don't fix what AI exposes and just AI apply it to what's broken, it will make those problems even worse because here is the thing, AI does accelerate what you already have, so it can make a good process faster, but it can also make a bad process faster.

It can help a well-run team accomplish more, but it can also create more activity in a confused and low-performing team. It can analyze your data, but it can't magically make bad data good.

It can automate a customer journey, but it can't turn a [00:02:00] fundamentally broken customer experience into a great one without you fixing it first, and it certainly can't replace the strategic thinking and the decisions of the business owner. So today, I wanna talk to you about five things AI is going to expose in your business and what you should fix before you start automating everything.

Because ultimately, this isn't really an episode about AI, it's an episode about building a business worth owning, and yes, AI can definitely be a great tool while you do it. So let's get started

So let's start with the biggest misconception. When business owners hear about AI, their natural question that comes up is, what AI can do for me? What can I write? What can I automate? What can I [00:03:00] replace? What tool should I buy? But I think there is a better first question you should ask yourself, and that is, what should actually be happening in my business?

What should I or my team be doing in the first place that we're not doing? What is the ideal state of the customer journey, of the processes that we might not even have before we think about automating? 'Cause what I tell my clients, you can't automate a process that doesn't exist. You need to first have the process, know that it works, know that it's optimized, and then think about how to automate it, right?

AI is incredibly good at accelerating activities, and that means it forces us to confront something we've been [00:04:00] maybe able to ignore up to that point, and that is why are we doing this in the first place, or why are we not doing this?

For years, a lot of inefficiency in businesses is hidden, was hidden because humans were doing the work manually. That's not just small business. I've experienced that in corporations, and especially in ones where the process is divided into different departments, and then the departments don't talk to each other.

And then when you do a process improvement session, you realize that there is, let's say, two people from different departments doing the same thing. So that hasn't been just a small business problem. But small business definitely has that too. So maybe, let's say, creating a report took three hours. Maybe onboarding a client is taking two.

Maybe following up with leads took 30 minutes or is not [00:05:00] getting done because the owner procrastinates telling themselves they don't have time, or the person who's supposed to do it is also so overwhelmed that never happens, right? Maybe the owner is spending half a day answering the same questions from customers over and over, and you accept it because that's just how the business worked

Now AI comes along and says, "I can do it in five minutes," which is great, but suddenly we can ask much more important questions. Should we be even doing that? Or should we be even doing it in this sequence or to that extent?

And that is where I think AI becomes incredibly valuable, not just as a productivity efficiency tool, but as a business diagnostic tool because it forces you to look underneath the hood of your business

So the [00:06:00] first thing AI is going to expose is a bad or nonexistent process, because as I said, you can't automate something that doesn't exist. But I see it a lot with, bad processes with growing businesses. So for example, the owner says, "I wanna automate the client onboarding." And that's fantastic, great, but then I ask them, "Okay, what actually happens when the new client signs?

What is your onboarding process?" And then suddenly we discover that there isn't really a process. Like John sends an email, Sarah creates a folder, the owner remembers to send a contract, but there's no standard template. There is multiple versions of that on different computers. Someone else sends texts to the client.

The welcome package gets sent whenever somebody remembers, and sometimes it gets missed, and then everybody [00:07:00] does things slightly differently, so there's no standard

And there's usually different versions of emails or contracts or text in many different places, right? So if you are that owner and you think, "Oh, let's automate it," the problem is you can't really automate chaos or you'll just create more chaos, right? You're not gonna gain efficiencies doing that. You have to understand the process first, simplify it, we need to streamline it, document it, decide who owns it, and then you can start automating parts that make sense, that doesn't require maybe critical thinking or a lot of decision-making.

So that's why often it's hard to automate an entire process because of different scenarios that can happen through it. So if [00:08:00] that's not possible, you can automate parts of it. But definitely don't automate chaos, okay? Because AI can absolutely make a messy process move faster, and that will create more issues faster, right?

Because the process is still messy.

And this is why I really believe that the future of successful small businesses isn't just about having the best AI tools, it's about having better business architecture foundation underneath those tools. And we'll talk about it more with data But then the second thing that AI is going to expose is definitely your customer journey, right?

And this is huge because the business shouldn't be just a collection of individual activities. So individually, I just do marketing, and then sometimes the sales [00:09:00] happens, and that's disconnected from the service I deliver, which is then disconnected with how we follow up with the client who delivered the service, how we invoice and so on, right?

Your business should be a connected experience for the customer at the highest level, right? Think about that journey. Someone discovers you, however you're visible, wherever you are, then they might visit your website, they inquire, you respond, they book a consultation, you have a conversation with them, then you send them a proposal, they decide to buy, you onboard them, you deliver the service, hopefully you follow up, and then hopefully you have a process to retain them, right?

And then we want them to refer somebody else. So now imagine you use AI to improve one part of the [00:10:00] journey. Let's say you put a AI on your website, and it helps you to respond to inquiries in thirty seconds instead of six hours or forty-eight hours, right? Which is fantastic, great. But then if, let's say, your proposal takes five days to arrive, or your sales process is very confusing to the client, or their on- or your onboarding or the onboarding experience you deliver to them is terrible, right?

Or the customer to even work with you has to repeat the same information three or four times, and then your service delivery doesn't match what you promised during the sale, you really haven't fixed the customer journey. You just made one small part of it faster. So that's why I always encourage business owners [00:11:00] to zoom out first, right?

Don't just ask, "Oh, how can I improve these touch points?" Let's say the website inquiries or, my quoting process. Ask, "What is the entire experience my customer is having with my business?" And then once you understand it, look for gaps, look for leaks, look for roadblocks that maybe the client is experiencing.

Fix that first before you start automating. Because your customer doesn't experience your business in, departments or stages, right? They don't care that your marketing or sales or operations might be separate functions or that different people deal with it. They experience your brand, one business, no matter who does the step behind the scenes

And without you [00:12:00] understanding the entire process, improving it and intentionally designing it, AI is going to make the gaps between those functions much more obvious to the customer, and it's not gonna act in your favor

Then the third thing AI is going to expose is something I think it's even more fundamental, and that is when nobody knows who actually owns the decision when it comes to making a decision. And this becomes increas- incredibly important as your business grows. So let's just say your AI system can analyze your customer data and identifies that one category of clients is much less profitable than another.

And that's great. You have the information, but now what? Who decides what to do about it? Is it you as a business owner? If you're a larger business, [00:13:00] maybe it's sales, maybe it's operations, maybe it's the finance, right? Who is responsible for taking that information, actually looking at it, and making a decision?

That's where you discover the problem that you have nothing that has nothing to do with the technology and it's more that the business hasn't defined decision ownership. And that sometimes happens when you implement the technology but in very rushed way without the proper project structure to think about those things, to solve one maybe urgent problem, but didn't think of how that implementation of technology would affect your current processes, your current responsibilities in your team.

I always say, and that's something that one of my bosses taught me in corporate, business is about people, [00:14:00] processes, and then systems and tools. Those three things. And systems and tools, some of it is technology, some of it is documented processes. And whenever you change one of them, the two other will get affected to a lesser or bigger extent.

But I found that when you're implementing new technology, it is the most disruptive, and it will affect the other two, the processes and people the most. So without the proper preparation and thinking through of how those things get affected, what changes, how the ownership of decisions might be affected and changes, it does create more chaos than help when you implement technology in your business

And what I find, especially in small businesses who are growing, is they hire people kinda ad hoc, in a rush [00:15:00] because the current staff is overwhelmed, and I see it honestly with my husband lately, who changed jobs and is working for a smaller business. And it's not that the people that are hired aren't working hard enough.

They're usually very hard workers. But people are confused something, and they don't know, "What am I actually responsible for? What can I decide, and what can I not decide and need to bring to my boss or the owner to decide," right? "What do I need to escalate? What happens if I make the wrong decision?" And then when nobody knows that, everything eventually comes back to the owner.

And when it comes back to the owner, so for example, in my husband's case, the owner gets upset that they're being asked, but they haven't done the work to define all of those things t- so that employees can be independent, and they don't get asked [00:16:00] things that they shouldn't get, be asked, I mean the owners.

Which brings us to another issue AI is going to expose

Which is owner dependency. You know that business when everybody says, "Oh, just ask the owner." The customer has a special request, "Oh, ask the owner." Something goes wrong, "Oh, ask the owner." The price needs to be changed, ask the owner. We need to order some supplies or change a supplier, or we have an option between one or the other which one to use, ask the owner.

There is an unusual client request or maybe an issue, ask the owner, right? And then

Sometimes the owner doesn't even realize how much business lives inside their head, right? They know why things are done a certain way. They know which customers get exceptions, how to handle each customer issue that comes into whomever inbox, [00:17:00] because very often there's not even one customer service inbox, central one.

They know what good looks like. They know what to do when something goes wrong, and then they know all the little rules and nuances that nobody else knows And I have clients like that, where we work through all those things and define them and create processes and procedures first to remove the owner from every little decision to then be able to streamline the process and ultimately automate some parts of it, right?

Because then when you say, "Oh, I want AI to help me scale," it's impossible when your business lives inside your head. AI can't scale it for you, right? It cannot take your brain and scale it. So you have to get the knowledge out [00:18:00] of your head. You have to turn it into process, policies, principles, decision rules.

If this happens, you do this. Standards, documentation, training. Here is how you measure this. Here is how you calculate this. Here is how you create a quote. Systems. And then when you have that, only then AI can help you leverage those things. Only when you define the rules, you can have AI speed up some of those things.

So then the quoting process doesn't take you two days, but it takes you two hours or less.

And that's a really important distinction, right? And the goal isn't to eliminate the owner, it's to move the owner out of being the systems, out of being the bottleneck in the business. And ultimately, as an owner, that's what you want. You [00:19:00] didn't create this business to be a prisoner of it. You created this business to have freedom and to be able to have an asset, a valuable thing that you own.

You should be leading the business, not being the business

The fifth thing that AI is going to expose is bad information. And that's truly the same when you implemented any new technology. And I learned that back in my corporate world, even as one of the junior supervisors, whenever we're using a system, and the data that was put in the system that my team was using wasn't owned by my team.

It was owned by client accounts. And when wrong data was put or the ... was bad, what it turned into my team calling the wrong people, sending wrong [00:20:00] vendors, bothering a person in the middle of the night when they shouldn't have, right? So we always were saying like, with data, garbage in, garbage out. It's the same with AI.

And this is one of those things that sounds boring until it starts costing you money, it starts creating issues for the clients, it affects team morale because they're maybe doing something they shouldn't be doing, or they're getting the heat from something that bad data ultimately created.

Think about it this way, the simplest example. You might be thinking, "Okay, I'm gonna use AI to analyze my customers and see, which are my VIP customers, when do they buy, what are their buying patterns, decision-making. And then you're okay, but where is the customer information? Maybe some of it is in the CRM, some of it is in spreadsheets, some of it you don't even track, and you would have to [00:21:00] troll through thousands of emails.

Some customers are listed three times because their employees changed, and instead of changing the role of the employee, a new customer profile has been created And then you have different people using different definitions for the same thing.

So when you then ask AI to analyze the business, first of all, it can't do it well. So it might give you a beautiful answer, maybe even a very convincing answer, but the problem is it will be wrong information. It will be an answer that might send you in the wrong direction, and you can make bad decisions based , on the answer because AI couldn't truly process all the data well

Because the problem is AI can process bad [00:22:00] information much faster than you can, but it doesn't make the information good. Therefore, the analysis is gonna be bad as well

And this is why the businesses that are going to get the most value from AI won't necessarily be the ones that have the most sophisticated technology, but they will be the ones that have clean data information, clear processes, good systems, consistent definitions, so nomenclature in that data, reliable KPIs, disciplined operation.

And that's when you have that foundation, that architecture is strong, that's when AI becomes incredibly powerful, and it can truly impact your business in the best ways possible and help you grow at a fraction of a [00:23:00] cost of what it would take you to maybe hire experts to get to that point before the AI age

So then you may be thinking, "Okay, Maggie, so if AI isn't the first step, what is?" And I'm gonna give you five questions I wanna invite you to ask yourself before you automate anything. Number one: Is this process necessary? Assuming that you have a process documented and you know what it is, but is this necessary? Just because you've always done something doesn't mean you should continue doing it, or maybe it doesn't mean you should continue doing it that way.

Maybe it's necessary, but then there's parts of that process that aren't, or parts of that process that are just clunky, non-effective, and should be changed, right? But definitely don't automate unnecessary work. Eliminate first. Number two: [00:24:00] Is this process simple? If something takes 17 steps, don't immediately assume that those 17 steps have to be that way.

Don't ask AI to automate those 17 steps. Ask yourself why there are 17 steps. Can we do it in half or less, right? Can it become five steps or eight steps? Can some steps be eliminated or shortened? Number three: Is the ownership clear? Who owns the outcome? Who owns the process? Or who owns the result of the process?

Not necessarily who touches it, that will be who do I need to train, right? If I implement AI, but who owns the result

Who is accountable to make sure that everything [00:25:00] happens correctly? Number four: Is the information reliable? So if you're feeding AI bad data, you are going to get bad decision with a very convincing explanation attached to them. So let's say you're trying to automate customer service. If you don't teach AI on your customer service policies, what do we do in the most common cases, when to escalate to a human to make certain decisions, AI will just make up the answers, and you might not like them

Number five is when a human needs to make a decision. At what point AI automation stops and things get escalated to a human. Because ultimately, you won't be able to automate 100% of your business, 100% of everything. There will be certain exceptions or more [00:26:00] complicated cases, whether it's with, sales process or customer service process or whatever, when a human needs to get involved, and you need to define when that is.

And then the next one is, can we measure whether everything is actually working, and how do we know when the things are not working? Because otherwise, you're just automating activity and not necessarily improving your business, right? And once you answer those questions, then you can think, okay, where AI can help, right?

That's when AI becomes really powerful, adding fuel to your business engine

And this brings me to the idea I would love for you to remember from today's episode, and I think there are two ways we can look at AI. You can look at AI as an accelerator, or you can look at AI as a multiplier, right? An accelerator makes [00:27:00] something happens faster, but a multiplier amplifies what's already there.

So if you have a great process in AI, great process faster. But if you have a bad process in AI, you have a bad process happening faster. A great customer experience in AI, you potentially have even better customer experience. A broken customer journey in AI, you have confusion at scale. Good data in AI, better insights, better decisions made from those insights.

Bad data in AI, bad insights, bad decisions, usually at scale, right? A well-led team plus AI, you have a team with more capacity, a team that can go further and create way better results because some of the minute [00:28:00] tasks have been taken away from them, right? But a team that's unclear responsibilities, that's chaotic, nobody knows what's going on AI, you have more activity and potentially more chaos.

So more work is created, and that's usually for you

And I truly think that this is a great real opportunity that with AI, it's not just it's giving us new tools, it's giving us business owners a reason to look at the business differently, right? To ask ourselves, what are we doing? Why we're doing it? Who owns it? How can we make it simpler? Do we create, does that create value for the customer?

Can someone other than me do it? Those are business building questions, not just AI questions.

And this is exactly why I believe that AI belongs in the conversation [00:29:00] about building a business worth owning. Because a business worth owning isn't simply a business that makes money. It's a business that works well. It's a business where your customer has a great experience, where your team understands what they're responsible for, works well together, and ultimately, the cumulative results of their inputs is so much greater than the individual tasks that they're doing.

This is where your process don't exist only inside the owner's head, and the owner is the bottleneck for every decision, every exception, and everything. A great business is where you know your numbers, where your technology supports people and processes instead of creating more [00:30:00] complexity

Where you as the owner can step away without everything falling apart, and where growth doesn't automatically means more work for you, more chaos, more overwhelm. So before you go and start looking at your next AI tool, I want you to do something else instead. Look underneath the hood of your business.

Find the things that are messy. Find the things that are unclear, repetitive, where everyone does something differently, even though it shouldn't be done differently. Find the things that nobody owns, and especially the things that are only in your head and only you know how to do it, even though somebody else could do it equally well or better.

Because those are the things that AI is going to expose and make worse if you don't fix them first

' Cause your goal is not to build an [00:31:00] AI-powered business. In today's day and age, like, it feels like everybody's trying to do that and lose the sight of the real goal, and the real goal is to build a great business that serves your customer at the highest level, that it's a recognizable brand that customers love, that you are the best in what you do in your industry, in your area for your customers.

And then you wanna use AI to make that business even better

That's a business worth owning. So my name is Meggie Perotin, and this is The Diamond Effect Podcast, strategies to build a business worth owning. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.