Transcript of The Automation Irony: Why Are We Still Working So Hard?

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Welcome to We Fixed It. You're welcome. The show where we take over companies, you come along for the ride, and we try to put them back better than we found them. Welcome back. We live in the most automated era in history. AI writes our emails, virtual note takers summarize our meetings, and workflow tools claim to eliminate busy work. There are hundreds, if not a thousand plus automation tools on the market right now. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. Each automation tool wants to give us time back in our workday, freedom and peace of mind. Market forecast suggests that the usage of automation tools and platforms is growing by 10 to 15% year over year. We all want the dream they're selling. We all want to be the stock image on their homepage. You know, like the person blissfully swinging in a hammock on a workday. So much free time. Yet, Most Americans and across the world, people are working long weeks, often well beyond 40 hours, early days, late nights, and we are collectively stressed out and exhausted. With so much automation available, why hasn't the work part gotten any easier? How do we all achieve the dream we were promised?

We're going to get into that. Melissa Chino, I know you're up for this. I think we can fix it, but let's be sure we can. Joining us today is Steve Furman. He's a tech executive and AI coach who helps companies align and scale up with AI and yeah, automation. He brings more than four decades of experience building and scaling technology companies. His expertise is in high demand and we've got him. Steve, tell us more about yourself.

Thanks, Aaron. I appreciate it. Nice to see everybody. So I built, bought and sold six tech companies over the last 40 years. I've always been a, what I like to call a tech visionary. I saw cloud before it was called cloud. And I've, you know, the benefit of leveraging it and getting out a few times, I even had to shut one down. Not everybody's perfect. What can I tell you? But I ended up getting into chief AI officer program and I got certified two years ago because I figured out that I could take static data and I can massage it and ask it questions and have it come to life. And when you're a business coach, which I'm also a certified scaling a business coach, that really gets to become some important tool to use when you're looking at disk reports or most of our reports, you can understand how people really think together, but yet you can go beyond the data it gives you and you can dig deeper.

Well, great. Thanks, Steve. We're going to use your expertise and you're going to throw down and get into our conversation. Let's get into what we're talking about. So we can see we can't automate you. We're glad you're a real person that you're here. But automation, we're let's talk about it together. So let's think about the word automation. It used to be like a punchline, you know, decades or a century ago, you pictured like a crackpot inventor with wild hair and a crazy prototype with a million parts on it. It's supposed to do all your work for you, but then it goes up in smoke. Like, if you've ever seen the Rube Goldberg machines, they turn simple tasks into absurd contraptions, like hamsters running on a wheel and a boot kicking something. And then Charlie Chaplin famously mocked workplace automation with machines that promised efficiency but delivered chaos. They made things worse. But of course, automation started working. There were conveyor belts and machines and factories that applied labels to bottles. But what about the everyday worker? For decades, the idea of automation sounded good, but the reality rarely worked well. But now it does. There's AI productivity tools, there's software bots, there's automation workflows that can handle tasks that once took hours or entire roles to achieve.

They can write code, design websites, do mindless repetition and busy work. The outputs may not be perfect, but every step they get right is something we didn't have to do ourselves. Research suggests that 30 to 50% of today's work tasks could technically be automated. And most office workers now use some form of AI at work. We're not talking about automation as replacement, we're talking about it as enhancement and a replacement for the drudgery of work. But that's not even counting other solutions, like human virtual assistants that'll take on tasks for us, food delivered to our door, videos we don't even have to drive to the store and rent, traffic we don't have to sit through when we work from home. Where is the time? It seems like we're as busy or busier than ever. There's never enough time. Despite the tools, the average American workweek still hovers around the same range it has for decades. We're up early, we're staying late, we're answering emails on weekends, we're hopping on one more Zoom call. How is it that we're not getting ahead here?

I don't think that they're leveraging it properly. They're not in thought on governance and how will it be used in the workplace. So you've got what I call AI sprawl or shadow AI, where people are, you know, John's using ChatGPT to write some programs or maybe do some automations. And Sally's over there using Gemini. The two aren't being intertwined or shared, so they're not collaborating. And they're both getting frustrated because they get to a certain level and then they're like, ah, we can't figure it out. I'll just move on. Or they have no one to go to to ask. I think that's one of the first issues that I see a lot of in my work, is that people aren't doing it with thought process of governance, guardrails, standard operating procedures, and just planning it to, AI is really a tool. It's not the answer. And it's just a tool. If you're still tools at things, well, you're going to open a bunch of tools that really are not working together.

Thank you, Steve. If everyone, I understand the uniformity and the consistency, But let's say each person is using AI for their own role or their own methods and they get it to work to their advantage. You know, it's, isn't that a step forward? Like, shouldn't there be, okay, it didn't save two hours in a workday, but did it save 45 minutes? Where are the 45 minutes?

I think, but it's about what Steve mentioned is it's the AI strategy and not having an integrated and focused strategy. And so, In the world that I have worked in, we kind of call this the walled garden trap. And it's really silos. It's just about silos, right? So you deploy AI in these silos, then you can't really access the entirety of the journey of whatever operational process that you're working on or the customer journey or what, you know, the response and the outcome that you're focused on is, it's kind of like if you go to the doctor and And only one person that sees you is focused on one symptom instead of the entirety of what you've gone through and what medicines you're taking, et cetera, et cetera. So I really think it's incomplete when you just say, okay, we have AI, to Steve's point, right? We wanna say that we're utilizing AI, but you're not thinking about it in a very strategic manner. So the fix would really be about prioritizing that integration. Using sort of AI boundary or wrapper to connect those silos so that you're giving AI the full context so it can really be helpful.

And it also is giving you space to have the human assist and the auditing that needs to be done that is crucial for the positive outcomes and results you're looking for. And then you can look at how do you reduce redistribute the work.

Aaron, that gets to your point, right?

Redistribute the time, the work, the effort, et cetera.

I actually want to peel it back a level because, you know, we're talking about AI in silos and people actually adopting it. But I think what we need to look at is how people use AI or maybe why people have barriers to using AI. And I think, you know, how many articles where it's AI is taking over your jobs and this and that. And there is a hesitancy to adopt AI for a lot of people. So I think to understand how to connect it, we need to understand why baby people aren't using it as much as they can be. I think part of that is analysis paralysis. There's a lot out there. Steve, you mentioned Gemini and someone else might be using Copilot from a governance perspective as well. Depending on what your business is, if you're a lawyer, you might not want to be using AI because you want to trust the validity of the answers it's sharing with you. And maybe legally, you're not able to. And so what I'm seeing having worked with a few agencies is they're now creating their own internal AI so that it's all within a certain hub so that you can trust that AI to learn from what you need within your agency.

Versus putting it on an open source data where maybe some sensitive information you don't want to have shared, you know, is still confidential. So I think there's a piece of that, of can we trust the data? There's the, I'm afraid that this is going to take over my job. And like you've mentioned, Steve, and Melissa and Aaron, it's supposed to help us. It's not going to replace us. It's supposed to be used as a tool. And I think We need to have learning around what that can look like. And I think again, I'm sure, Steve, this is where you come in and where you're educating a lot of organizations on what to do.

Back to Aaron's point, why aren't we getting a bunch of time back? Well, the first thing is you gotta think about we're humans, we're people. And we may have robots helping us do things or AI helping us do things, but at the end of the day, you got to keep a human in the loop. A human, you know, AI doesn't have emotion. It can't reason well, to a certain extent, but it's not really reasoning in the way that we can reason as humans, because we can take contacts without any information from someone else, and we can then reason it up ourselves. But change management, I literally went to a township and the town manager flat out told me, I got two years till I retire. As far as I'm concerned, I'm going to try and avoid AI as much as possible. And I'm like, why? He said, well, honestly, I got people that work here 20 to 30 years. They don't like change. They like it the way it is. So, you know, are they still working the same? Yeah. And they are. There's, I think that's why I stick so strictly to, you got to get your governance.

You got to find out what's the end goal of the company. What's your big Harry Audaces goal? And this is maybe where my coaching comes in. What are you trying to achieve as a company? How can you leverage AI? I always think in asking it, what can you do to help me? How can you help me? How can I leverage you? That's kind of my thought process when I'm thinking in AI. And that's really important when it comes to getting your company to go, it's kind of like building a building without putting in good studs and, you know, a good foundation. It's going to fall down, it's going to crumble, or you're going to get the silos, as Melissa was talking about. And that's not collaborative at all. That's, I think, going to add hours to your workday, Aaron. That's where it comes from.

I love what you're saying, Steve. I love that it's, you're getting to the root and the foundation of what we're talking about here. And there is, Chino, the cultural issues of fear, change management, all the things we've talked about, and that has to do, way past AI, but when you're feeling threatened that the work you're doing and the value you bring to a company is threatened, of course you're going to be fearful of what this new process looks like. And so what we need to do as leaders and organizations and through, Steve, your consultive roles as a tech guru here is really take AI's highest purpose isn't to replace the workforce. It's really to rescue them from the operational grind, from making the errors that they do because they're just tired and they just, you know, it's just, it's things that repetitive processes and operations that can be automated, right? But you're still in need of, to your point, who is in charge of the empathy, who is in charge of the critical thinking, who is in charge of making sure that the needs of the customers have been met. It's the human that is able to do that.

Now, you can't have AI put in some rules for critical thinking, but it's a check. It's not necessarily that they're going to be able to say, Hey, you should be sending some flowers to this person, right? You know, it's actually a check that says, Hey, We've completed this process and your email reply seems a little stale and formal for the tone of what was the request, et cetera. Again, I feel like we need to make sure that we somehow continue to integrate the teams in the processes. And one of the things that I used to do when I was bringing AI onto the team, and I think Steve, as a coach, you understand this, is you you need to get people involved at the get-go because they don't want something thrown at them. They want them to be part of the solution. And so if you are sharing with them, what are the things that are just the mundane processes that you have the most trouble with and that we need to have consistently handled every single time a certain way, and then let them know that where they bring value is when they are actually delivering this amazing result and anticipating the needs of the customer.

And they are really able to really create that relationship that is necessary to, you know, continue to grow loyalty, to continue to grow retention, et cetera, et cetera, all the numbers that the business is looking for. And they're using AI to drive those numbers.

There's two things I think are very important, and you just touched on them, Melissa. You need to have buy in from the executive team. It's the executive team. Isn't bought in that this is the initiative we're gonna take, this is the way we're gonna drive our company, these are the ways that we're going to do it ethically, governance, we're gonna write operating procedures, usage policies, they're gonna take the time to do it right. And also, I think it's important for the upskilling of the people and having them be, like you said, engaged in the process. And they should be excited about the process. It shouldn't be a bummer. Oh my God, AI is coming, there goes my job. I mean, it's like, AI is coming, it's going to make my job easier. This is awesome. I can't wait to leverage it. So I go learn some new stuff and I can actually use my brain more instead of punching the ticket every day all day.

Yeah, but that's what we're talking about though. So there are things, there's tasks or repetitive or going through endless spreadsheets or whatever that you can do. It could have taken two hours, now it takes 30 seconds. And I'm not, you know, we can discount the, the, the old guard and the naysayers and the holdouts and I'm never going to change. I'm talking about, okay, the people that get it, get in line and say, yeah, this is for me. I want to upskill. I like, I like what you're saying. I like this process that we're putting together as a company. I just accomplished something that used to take me two hours. I did it in 30 seconds. In reality, I've got two hours left or in concept, I got two hours left. In reality, I don't. Like, where are those two hours? Why are they, why do I feel busier than ever? That's what I want to talk about.

To answer that question, Erin, and again, it's going back to not just change management, but looking at behavior, going back to psychology a little bit here, right? We've learned how to work, you know, for years and years. It's okay. Everyone punches in, you got your 40 hours and you need to be here from nine to five. That is kind of what is there. And it's really interesting having worked in different agencies and we've all been there where, you know, kind of done work. You know, you could be going home early, but it's the perception of I need to, I need to look like I'm on. I need to look like I'm on. And now, particularly in a remote world where people don't get to see you physically as often. And, you know, there's a lot of questions of, you know, especially when you look at return to work, wanting to make sure you can visibly see that. Right. And so we have learned that we need to be working nine to five versus how can we make that more efficient? And I think some of the salt there is we need to relearn as a society how to work again, right?

Again, going back to Steve and your point, Melissa, around it being a tool. So first and foremost, we gotta change the way our mental heuristic, our how our brain thinks about what AI is. So that's the first thing, right? We need to be able to trust and not have that fear of using AI. So it's the first thing. The second, I think, in order to do that is getting engaged early, as we've discussed, but also playing, learning a little bit about AI, right? I think the first thing anyone should do is, okay, what are those tasks that I hate doing, whether that's, you know, tracking your time sheets, doing a financial spreadsheet, whatever report that you absolutely hate, writing down kind of those like two things. Maybe it's just two things, right? Talking to AI and exploring what that looks like for you, because again, this is all new. We've never had a blueprint for this and we're all kind of machine learning in real time for ourselves on how to use AI. And so being able to explore and have that discovery process as part of the introduction and the executive buy-in is super important to do so that people can now feel comfortable saying, well, actually, now that I've tested it out a little bit and I know how to test it because we've had these guardrails, we know exactly what program we're using.

Oh, wait a minute. I just took two hours back of my time.

Now.

What do we do with that? Is that do we need to fill that time with other things? Are we able to allow our culture and society to say, maybe go for a two hour lunch? Are we there yet in society to say, maybe the nine to five, maybe it's a four day work week? These are the questions that I think are going to continue to evolve as AI evolves because we have been trained And, you know, prime to think of a workweek being that 9 to 5, 40 hours where AI now is challenging what that can look like. And you can see that testing out.

I would give a very personal example on this as a leader who just automated some two teams works. So 24 people were working on this. We automated it and that work went away. Okay. And so, Aaron, to your point, what happens to the work that goes away? Why are we not seeing less stress on the team? I will just say as a leader, a leader of large teams and small teams, leaders treat automation wins as a way to continue to raise the bar, raise the bar, not lowering the load. So time saved, quality becomes and not so quietly. I didn't quietly do it. I told them they were all reassigned to other, other, other roles.

Okay.

So they didn't see that that actually helped them. That just meant that the job that they were doing once now they're doing another job that actually they don't made me really like that much because this was a little more easy. I mean, mindless kind of work. They could listen to podcasts while they were doing it, and now they have to, like, really pay attention or they have to get on the phone and talk to a customer. I had one of them say I wasn't wanting to get on the phone and talk to customers. Why are you doing this to me? I said, well, then you don't have a job, right? So we lack organizations, to your point, Chino, lack those guardrails that say, when we reclaim those hours, so like I'm giving you back those three hours, go back and use one and a half of those for your own personal curiosity and learning time. Use one and a half of those hours for the company. We don't do that. And we're measured on speed, volume, productivity, outputs, widgets. So it's about being more efficient, but at the same time, we're not making it so the worker bee feels better.

I always say that children are products of their environment and they only know what they see, what they hear, what they're exposed to. And if you think about that, it's really, truly the same context of us as workers. We only know what we've been trained to do. You know, I've been around 40, you know, four decades, a little longer, but who's counting? You know, and I've always, what I, what I'm really good at is working. I love working. I'm happy doing it. I'll do it tirelessly all day long because I love doing what I'm doing. But I think that there's the smart leaders like you just said, Melissa, that would go, you know what? Yeah, we gained back two hours. Why don't you guys take a half hour, an hour and a half, or whatever it is, and learn something you want to learn. You know, the capital you're going to gain in that employee for caring about their well-being, their learning. I think that's part of what we are figuring out with AI and automation, like, you know, Some people are going to go gangbusters. Great. Give you another 20 hours on top of what you're doing because you're automated it.

And I think the smart ones are the ones that are going to really grow in scale are the ones that are giving back time and giving back, you know, what the employee feels like they've been taken away from them. What's been taken away from them?

I appreciate that. And, you know, I don't, I'm not saying Melissa, I'm not saying pay anyone to stand around and watch a machine work. Like obviously if, if a job position's eliminated or efficiency gains, like they've got to go somewhere else and there's retraining involved or maybe they, you know, they, there's companies doing mass layoffs for automation purposes and, and pocketing the difference. But those that are left in the company, you know, are they working a 38 or 40 hour work week? Probably not. They're probably absorbing, you know, cross full cross functional tasks and picking up a grab bag of whatever's left. And I, I would doubt that they're going home humming, you know, at 459. They're just, they're overloaded. Yeah.

Yeah, you're 100%. And you're seeing that this week, the mass layoffs at Amazon, at Meta, at all of these places that are happening. And I hate that they're saying it's because of AI, because then again, to Steve's point, strategically you have built this AI versus us culture type of thing going on. And you're right, like the guilt, not even the guilt, but the amount of work left for the people there. Because to our point, AI does certain things very well. And I'm not going to say that it doesn't like what we automated. It was wonderful. It was consistent. It was clear. It was, it was, accurate, which was our issue. It was an issue. There were human errors involved. So we were very excited and we saw a $1 million drop in in error payouts. So that was great. But it doesn't change the fact that there's still a lot of work that needs to be done within these companies that humans have to do. And now you've taken away, you know, 4,000 employees at Amazon and expect the people left there to carry the burden.

Now all of a sudden it's going to be perfect. Well, guess what? It hallucinates. It's not there yet.

And this, and this is what I was alluding to about rethinking about what the work culture is. And Steve, you mentioned really, you know, it's what I'm trying to touch on. Yes, you can fire everybody and say, you know what? AI has just done that by 4,000 people. Who cares? That's how it feels like. And this is where, again, from our first point, people aren't going to adopt it if this is what's happening. And at the end of the day, the harsh reality is AI is taking people's jobs. So let's not pretend like that's not happening. We're seeing these mass layoffs. But where I think companies are being really short sighted is they're thinking, okay, great, bottom line this year overhead, because there's so much going on with AI. They're kind of forgetting that long term on the people side, right? If everybody has AI running their entire company, there's no one, there's no one there. There has to be jobs. There's work that needs to be done that AI will never be able to do. And where people are missing is that time to explore the people who are invested in you, like your number one value proposition is the people that you, you have.

If you don't look at your people as the top important thing within your company, exactly. Thank you, Steve. You're nothing. And so if you can enrich your teams, you took two hours back instead of cutting them off or everybody and again, bringing that fear so that now people aren't going to adopt it in the future, allow them to think about ways to make your company better. And if you can provide that discovery time, you're gonna find things that you would have never even thought in your company because you didn't have people to think about that, how to program and how to train the AI and the machines to do what you need to do the most effective, efficient way. And so I think it's very shortsighted to do that. And again, we need to massage what we think is the work we get. Getting AI to do those two to three hour reports that we hated to do. And we have, you know, it takes off our Friday because we usually do admin on a Friday. Most people get people to leave a little bit early or that's your exploring time on the Friday. And you know what the employee satisfaction is going to be back.

And if that is your number one asset, why wouldn't you bring that back?

If you're able to do the same production, make the same money, Plus, God knows how much more, save the same amount of hours or God knows how much more. Why not think about, you know what, a three-day work week? We're not thinking about saying to your employees, Hey, you did a great job today. Or early, you did a good project or whatever. People don't realize how important it is to that asset, which is your employees. How much that really matters to them and they will, They will work as many hours as you need for a project. They will, I hate to say, die for you, but you know what I'm saying. They would go to bat for you at any given time because you treat them like a human.

I think that you have really brought out a few things, Chino. I love this. I would call it kind of like the watch outs that we have to be prepared for. And one of the things that I just mentioned, and I think, Steve, you've mentioned this as well, but automation has a tendency to shift work into the upstream. And if no one's there, then how is that going to be completed? So those productivity tools move effort from customers or front-line agents into ops, data, other teams. That's why silos happen and create these hidden bottlenecks and actually a lot of burnout. Also, when their strategy isn't solid, And there's lagging adoption of that strategy because it hasn't to some point, you haven't gotten everyone at the table on board. Then you're going to have these pockets of dysfunction and that's a problem as well. And then, Aaron, your point, I know you're trying to drive this home, but rising expectations with no relief, right? So as research has shown, large share of tasks are automatable. You know, we can automate a lot of things and tools improve that. AI helps leaders quietly raise expectations, right? Instead of revisiting that 40 hour norm, locking teams into permanent productivity paradox and not allowing them the time to be innovative, creative.

You know, one of the things I loved at one of my companies is we had a block of time that leaders had on their calendar that was for just King time. And, you know, if you choose to use that to clear out your email inbox, that's on you. But I think that to have a three hour block on a certain day that you can sit in a room and, you know, over popcorn and a soda, talk to team members and be like, what have we solved this week? How do we feel about that? How could we have done that differently?

Which is ideal if something else comes off the calendar. And the expectation something else shifts. You know, Chino, you mentioned agencies. You know, you're talking about agencies, the agency culture of unlimited PTO. Take the time you need. You want to go do something or we all do picnics on Wednesday afternoons. That's great in theory. And I got a deadline and this client's pinging me and I've got, you know, I have a review coming, all those stressors. Don't go away unless there's, there's got to be a lot of restraint in the, in the company culture. And, and the, yeah, we used to have that block on the calendar and it was a practical. We got rid of it. You know, like, how do you stick to those? You make a commitment, you stick to it, or you keep adapting it and evolving it as efficiency gains are realized by the company with profitability and all the good benefits come along with it. How do you keep from overburdening the employees that are playing along and saying, I'm following you.

And if you don't have the executive team consistently pushing down, here's our values, here's a big hairy audacious goal, here's what we're trying to get to, here's why we do what we do. If they won't go to, I'm a Marine, okay? I'm not going to go to war for a general unless I believe in the cause of why we're doing what we're doing. And it's the same thing in a company. If you have that culture and that core value set, and everybody's fighting the same fight. I think that's where you really where you drive the change and you can all do it together and they'll be happy doing it.

Agreed. And it's a rare company, I think you know, I want to hear from you. It's a rare company that says, yeah, ignore that client call. We block Tuesday afternoons. Don't take a meeting, don't take a client call consistently forever. We got your back on it. It's a rare company that's going to keep that up for any length of time.

I, with my clients, I would flat out tell them, don't call me for tech support. You can call me, I want to talk to you if you want to hang out and have a conversation, but if you call me, I'm just going to hand it over to the tech manager, which means now I got to regurgitate what you said. And eventually I trained them to start calling Rocco, who was my tech manager at the time, and then Rocco would get it handled with the engineers or write a ticket or whatever. And me, I got to have my thinking time. I got to work on whatever I had to work on. So I think it's a culture set.

When we're looking at it as leaders, so if you were to sit down with an executive team at any, wherever company, agency, brand, you know, you're running your own little shop. You need to decide first and foremost what your company is going to be. Are you going to be leading? Do you want to be innovative? Do you want to be making a lot of money? Guess what? The number one, when you look at historical data about What companies thrive, what companies make most money? It's always ones that have some form of innovation happening within their team. And AI allows for that, if you bet it, right? You're right, Aaron. There's real life happening. I love, I run my own company. I run my own little thing. I try to like have Fridays, but the reality is client needs come. Money needs to come in. If I'm not able to do something, it's not there. So, you know, that time that you try to block off doesn't always work. It can't always be Friday between like nine to 10. But if you can allow some flexibility in your, your team's time, so say you, you know, got an hour back, right?

We were able to do this report really quickly. It doesn't need to be a set time, but if you can allow people to think. And if you want to be an innovative company where we know historically research has shown our companies that make more money at the end of the day, we're all talking about a business, right? You want your teams to think innovatively and to adopt those tools so they can keep thinking, how can we do this better? And if they're doing it with less stress, less lift, but allowing you to push forward, That makes everybody happy. And again, if we go back to your people being your top asset in your company, it also will help you. You know, maybe you look at schedules if you can, and maybe three day work week, four day work week is something you can offer from a culture perspective. And you know who's going to want to work there? You're telling me, I can use my brain. I can think strategically. I can help you make money, meaning that I get to make money. I don't have to worry about my job security there.

Listen to what I have to say.

Exactly. Right. People will want to work then and guess who you're attracting? The top talent.

Well, I really think it's a bit, I mean, it's, it's the business strategy. It's business planning. It's just like what we do with a product roadmap. You need a hard code these reclaimed times and hours into the operating model. So when you free up hours, you pre commit that a percentage of that goes back. To either fewer hours or backlog reduction or special projects. Like special projects is fun. You can put a bonus on them. You can do innovation lab time like we were talking about. And it just, it starts the juices flowing and it shows on the roadmap just hard coded, just like, you know, project initiative X, right? That's getting launched in three quarters. And this is the ROI on that. This is the ROI on your employees, and that's the most important resource. And I love that all four of us have been able to kind of get back to this place where it's like, what has actually happened to that time? And really, the time was always there, but we as organizations and companies and leaders have always looked at that as, okay, I'm going to take that and run with it somewhere else, right?

I and fill it with more stuff to get more stuff.

With more stuff. Exactly.

I would go as far as saying it's definitely not the right answer. More stuff is not always the right way to go. Just because you did more, didn't mean you did any more effectively or any better or you saved any time or energy. It just means you get more stuff.

It's like those cartoons where you're running and you're just running and running and running and running and you're hopping up the wheel, man.

Steve, when companies come to you and they say, we've implemented the systems and we bought into the enterprise software and we thought everyone would, we thought we'd get these, the gains and we thought we'd get the time back. We do want to do right by our employees, but it didn't do what we wanted it to do. It's the software's fault. Like, what do you, what do you tell them?

I tell them, stop, drop, and roll. We're going to take a step back. Let's take a look at what you have, how it's set up, how it's being implemented, what everybody's using. And depending on what I find, basically the readiness assessment and a roadmap blueprint. But basically when I understand their environment and what they've done, then I can kind of start either peeling things out, adding things in, saying, you know, this is the right way to go, that might be the right way to go. But until I understand where they are in their journey, it's kind of hard to say every single time I do exactly this, I always, always, always can guarantee you I'm going to ask a lot of questions. And I'm going to ask questions of every department head because, you know, I might ask the question, what do you want to start, stop and keep? Not every executive is going to necessarily have the same answer.

It's true.

They have their own agendas. But I'm looking for is who has the same core values and the same agenda as the leader of the organization or leaders of the organization? And are they all on the same page? Once we get that figured out, Then you can start looking at AI, how can we implement it to make things better, faster, more efficient, upskilling employees, training, all of that, make sure there's governance and guardrails up there. That's how I go about it always. It's never any different.

It seems like a lot of companies start with the solution. They start with, here's the technology, here's the promise, here's what they're telling us it can do, here's the feature set, here's 2.0s coming out in a couple months. That's going to be even better. But you're saying don't start with the solution, address the problem.

Yeah, but see, everybody think it's a tech problem. It's a tech issue. It's not. It's an operations problem. Operationally, what do we need to look at in order to improve, in order to be better, more efficient? And then the tools may or may not come later. And it may be an off-the-shelf tool, or maybe you have to write an agent, or you have to use make. And create an automation process that will talk to different applications. But you never really start as, it's not a tech problem. I say it all the time, it's an operations problem, it's a executive problem, and that's where it needs to start. And you should get together and get a AI council together to the executive team. And you should start having discussions on where are we trying to get to and then work backwards. Okay, how can we get there? We want to be here super. How do I get over the next, you know, year, six months, three months, 90 days, 30 days, whatever, however you're measuring your time and measure it. Do you gotta, is it working? It's not working. Are you stuck? Where are you stuck?

You gotta have meetings to have those discussions.

And just to add to that too, I think as well. So again, from an executive team, to executive leaders, what I would be saying to your teams, right? And this is where I come in on the people and culture side. Again, AI is a tool. It shouldn't be replacing people always, depending on what your company is, right? Like again, there's, it is, it's bound to happen in some places, but the best companies, innovative companies, people who are going to survive in 10 years and make billions of dollars are the ones that are remembering that their people are assets. And I think what's important as leaders is to ask your team, What are two things that you hate doing that we can get AI to do for you? And you know what adoption rate is going to skyrocket in terms of people actually using the tool because they're saying, hey, this is helping me. And if you can reframe how we look at AIs versus this is competing against you versus again, this is a tool, not only will your teams adopt it, so then As executive leaders, when you meet, you actually have the data because if no one's using it, you're not going to have the data that's like, oh, we spent millions of dollars on this tool that nobody uses is not what we want to do as well.

You need to, we're all in the age of machine learning and relearning how to work. And I think without getting your teams on board and reminding them that it's their tools to help them on the shittiest tasks, excuse my French, that is the only way you're going to adopt and automate and then reframe how we can potentially look at how to structure your work week and relearn how to do that based on what the goals of the larger businesses. Do you want to lead? Do you want to be an innovator? Do you just want to kind of, you know, keep the status quo, whatever that is, it's not for me to decide or us to. But to talk to Steve and get your teams to come together and figure that out.

Well, I love what you said, Chino, because it's truly a fix. In my estimation, this is one of the things that I would say is a fix. So you invest in enablement, not just the tools, and that enablement is that human touch. So treat AI and automation like a new colleague. Onboard them, train people around them, give the team simple playbooks, your favorite words, you know, for when to lean on the tools versus human judgment. And I think the biggest mistake is treating AI like a replacement for human conversation, for the human mind, the rationale. Steve, you mentioned that the goal isn't to build like a wall of automation. It's to design a seamless partnership so that you're getting to the outcomes that you want and not just outcomes, meaning tasks, but really looking at every automation project with like a clear outcome. What do you want? It's not just about less tickets in the system, right? It's about what do you really want? So bundle all of this into end to end journeys and ask it from the customer's perspective or from like the business's perspective is what is that outcome that we're looking for?

And so, Really looking at integrating it from the top down, I think is so important. So I love, you know, like, you know, I had to get Playbook in there for you.

So thank you. You know, I love it.

I gotta have a playbook, but I want to drop one little quick nugget that I think is very important for people. This will help you. You don't have to start big. Start small. Take something really small and mundane in your business and intake form, contract review, number, country, whatever. And work on it internally, get some wins, measure it, check the status of it. Am I stuck? Are we moving forward? How is it working? Is it returning any ROI? And then you can move yourself to more outward-facing type tasks.

Well, let's flip it real quick. So let's say you're, okay, so you're an employee. You've bought into every step of this. You have everyone, good intentions all around. You have the leadership that wants your success and they want the company gays and all that, but let's say 20% of your role has efficiency because of automation. And you've got time to think and there's pressure in the company and they want to fill that time up and they're assigning you new. What's the right way to have a productive conversation and to frame it and to say, look, we have an opportunity here.

For an employee, so what's the value add to give people time back? Well, employee satisfaction, because at the end of the day, you need people to do the job. The robots can never do our job 100%. And so, you know, you risk losing great people. Because again, if you can, you know, retain the best, attract the best, that is, you know, I always say retaining your employees is your top recruitment tool. That's the top recruitment strategy. People who are into AI or people who want to adopt it, knowing that this is where the company's vision is, there's going to be changes that's bound to happen with any change with, regardless of whether this is AI new leader coming in, it's, you know, this is just the friction point of any change bring brought in. And I would say to HR and talent teams and executive leaders is again, Defining what that strategy is and where you want your business to be. Again, we cannot be shortsighted and say, great, we took three hours back and, okay, we can, you know, reduce 30% of the staff or whatever, whatever the case may be, because you're going to need people at the end.

So you want to retain your A players, get them excited. And so having, you know, looking at work schedule, looking at just even protected time, whether that's an hour each day, 30 minutes each day to test, or to have little committees of AI committees where people can try different things where they say, you know, they take the two things that they hate and work together within their department to figure that out and, you know, share that with the group. Help people's presentation skills, like the little soft skills that, again, AI can never take from people. There's so much value add into again, bringing that back. But again, I can't be the person to make that call. It's the leaders of where do you want to be? And if you want to stay current, you need to be able to do that. You need the innovation within your team or else, AI is going to take your company too. So don't be, it's something also to say as well. So you got to think strategically. All right.

I'm in. I'm in. I think we're fixing this. So don't, okay, so here's where we're at. We, this is a people decision, not just a software functionality, tech stack decision. So don't leave this decision up to your CTO. You know, we're going to mandate, we've got to do some automation, go find the best one out there, get the license, negotiate, and we're going to implement it. And that's, you're taking it too far. You, you, you missed some critical steps along the way. You, you gotta critical. You gotta gut check your people. You have to get everyone involved. You have to look at

cross, cross

this, across, cross functions, cross departmental, and, and real one-on-one talks to say, what, you know, what do you hate about your job? Give me two things you wish you'd never did again. Maybe we can prioritize that in our automation. Maybe you get some time back. And then as a company, you have to use some restraint, which is hard to do for profit driven companies to say that time, let's not fill that with 20 other things that, oh, good, you know, we freed that up now. Now we've got this, this pool of employees that is looking for work to do. No, they've got work to do. You just gave them. Ability to think a little better, skill up, or take a little break or do something that is different from the way we've all been running and running. Maybe there's a better way. So if we can pull those things together and then from the employee standpoint, you have to also be protective and you have to say, if I block that hour, I'm going to commit to it, which is really hard to do because someone's going to call you. Someone's going to pull you into a meeting and you have to be able to say no.

And we have to live in a culture and in a work environment and in a universe where no is an acceptable answer. Self-protection, mental health preservation, all those things. If someone says, I, it's a block on my calendar, or the company says, we take early Fridays, that doesn't mean work Saturdays or Sundays. That means you come back Monday. If we can all adhere to those rules, did we get a little bit of time back? Did we fix the situation? Melissa, what do you say?

I love this. I think this has been a really outstanding conversation, and I want to thank Steve for your insight here. I do believe that this creates a truly powerful collaborative fix. I think AI handles speed in the data, the human provides the heart and judgment. And instead of losing that personal connection, we're actively using tech to protect and enhance it. And we have to make sure there's governance, Steve, to your point, and ensure that even at scale as we grow, every customer, every business owner, every employee feels heard, not handled. So I love it.

Good job.

Good. Good, Melissa. You know, did we get, I don't know, it doesn't mean a three or four day work week. We're not there yet. But do we get some peace of mind? Do we get a little bit of relief? Do we get a few minutes back?

For the cool companies that I like working with, yes, it does mean sometimes do your four day work week. So yeah, but for everybody else, What it means, AI is an evolution, as we know. It's removing us from this really outdated, archaic, 9 to 5, 40 hours plug in, plug out. It's taking us from execution to strategic thinking and innovation. That's what AI allows us to do. And you're always going to need doers. We need to do the job. But if we can think smarter and work smarter, it doesn't mean you need to work harder. And I think that's the Nugget. And so allowing your teams to be strategic with how they use AI so that as a business, you can be a part of the innovators, the part of the people who in 10 years are going to be making names versus losing your business by not adopting this and remembering that your people are your asset is going to be big. So I do think we've brought a lot of fixes to the table. I think this is a topic we can talk about, you know, for hours. And so, Steve, so happy to have you here, too, to get your insights, but I think we fixed it.

Good, good. Thanks, Gino. Steve, take it. Take us home. Did it, did we fix it? Do we have a little peace of mind? Do we alleviate some of the pressures? What what do we accomplish?

There is a symbiotic relationship that has to happen between AI, the machine and humans. And I think as long as we're still running the show, and I believe we still are, I think it's up to us on how and what that symbiotic relationship looks like and how it's going to function. And is it going to be an easy thing to give somebody a three day work week or a four day work week? That's probably not going to happen anytime soon, let's be fair. But if you think about Europe, I'll use them for an example. They have a siesta where they take a break in the middle of the day and they come back and they work in the afternoon until 9:00 at night. There's something to be said for their happiness when you think about it, right? They take three months off. They shut down a city. There's a lot to be said for us in here in America. What do we do? Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. Produce, produce, produce, produce. So if we can leverage AI to do that mundane production and work work that needs to get done, and we can spend more time thinking strategically, being more visionary, hiring the right A players you want to work with, so taking your time not just throwing a body or a tool at something just to fix it, I think, yeah, we absolutely can help the automation benefit us and not hurt us, not just give us more to do.

But we have to think in the right mindset and it's got to be driven by the leaders. It's got to be pushed down and you need guardrails. So you were saying, Gina, that give people time to be creative. Absolutely. But they need guardrails on what that creation can be. Otherwise, we're humans, we get pretty creative.

Well, and I like kind of what you said, Steve. I just want to add on to that. You know, just personal experience. I had a whole bunch of contract Engineers, software Engineers working for me at a time, and they were from Madrid. And I didn't know there were so many Saints in the world because there were so many holidays. Like, I think it was over 54 that I counted that they took days for Saint whoever it was. And, look, to your point, always took the month of August off and. This was Chino, this was hard coded into our calendars. So we knew that they were gonna be gone all of August. So we got everything in. And it's amazing when you know these things and you can set parameters and boundaries around that, you can actually get a lot done. This was a startup and it was fine that they have that. I mean, we all thought, you know, being in the United States, we were like, this is crazy. They're never around. They're on Saint Something holiday. It was amazing because, you know, the protection of, you know, having it actually be something that's hard coded is what I, what I talk about.

Put it in the roadmap. Like, make sure that it's understood. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a standing hour every Friday afternoon. It just needs to be that we expect that we're giving our team its time and space to be curious, to learn, to innovate. And let's do something really cool with that. And let's take AI, let's take automation, let's take our product to the next level.

And one quick, one quick point on that too. I don't have the research in front of me, the data, but curious to look at life expectancy. I have a feeling they live a lot longer in Europe and different places. And at the end of the day, again, love working. We all like to, I do like to work in my own company. Like that's, you know, insane to do sometimes, But you got to think about what life is there. If I die tomorrow, what did I do? Did I just work the whole time? And I think they have, there's something there that I think we're missing and it can unlock a lot more for us as humans, as a society. So

yeah, give ourselves the same level of grace that we would give to others that set the parameters. We, we don't, we don't say, well, you have to, you know, they, if we were fortunate enough to work with other, other cultures and other countries. And they bring us into their world. We don't say, start playing by my rules. We say, oh, good. I understand. I would, you know, you set these expectations and you set these blocks and this is a observation and day and month or what? I understand. I'm not going to ask you to work during that. We don't do that for ourselves. Let's give ourselves some grace too. All right. Well, that's going to close out our episode. Before we go, I'd like to give another big thanks to Steve Furman for being our guest and playing along. Steve, how can people reach out to you or keep up with you and what you're doing?

Then go to www.thenumber4pillarcoach.com. I'm on LinkedIn. So @SteveFurman on LinkedIn. I have a YouTube channel. If you go to youtube.com/@SteveFurman, I post videos, I post blogs on my website. And I'm always on social media, always on LinkedIn. Just trying to give good, helpful information.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Steve. And thank you, Melissa. Thank you, Chi. Now, to our first time listeners and our returning Fixaholics, we hope you enjoyed. We're glad you found the time to listen to us, and I hope we came up with something you can actually use. Stress is real, so take good care of yourselves. Whenever you do get free time, you can catch all our backlogged episodes that we fixed at Pod. That's wefixeditpod.com keep living the dream and we will see you next time. We hope you enjoyed this episode of we fixed it. You're welcome. We go into every episode somewhat cold and nothing we say should be construed as legal advice, Financial advice, or anything that would get us in trouble. All trademarks, IP and brand elements remain property of their respective owners.