The runway is shrinking...

Remember 20+ years ago when having a website was optional? And even more recently when social media and content marketing were just “nice to have” for business? AI is in that same phase right now. Early adopters are turning it into an advantage. Very very soon, it will just be the norm..

Every industry is in the same boat. Finance, healthcare, manufacturing, education, professional services, etc. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a CEO, manager, or individual contributor.. the folks who treat AI like an afterthought are about to get buried.

The uncomfortable truth is this. The window where you can use AI for a true competitive advantage is shrinking and soon it will be the status quo.

So what do you do?

Stop chasing moonshots. Get started with simple, practical AI that saves you time. Focus on agents and automation that take friction out of your day-to-day. Ship experiments, learn fast, and reinvest your time into higher-value bets.

Here are some simple ways to get going.

Measure before/after

Last week I was chatting with a leader and they admitted that half their team probably spends 3ish hours a week hunting through email threads, folders, and random docs to find info. That’s not unique, it’s everywhere.

The first step is to measure it. Ask yourself and your team a single question: “How many hours a week are you wasting looking for info you know exists but can’t find?” Get a baseline, then repeat the survey after you pilot an AI solution.

Then map out where reclaimed time was actually going. Instead of only saying “we saved X hours a week,” look at how the added time allowed the team to take more sales calls, build strong customer relationships, and invest more time in strategic work. Measure both growth and efficiency. The before-and-after speaks for itself.

Putting this into action

• Run a quick pulse survey with your team. Keep it to a couple questions if you can. Start small and use a tool that can search across your docs and emails and allow you to “talk to your data.” Re-measure in 90 days to show the impact.

• Ask your team to log what they did with the reclaimed time and present both sides (savings and reinvestment) as your ROI for using AI.

Brain dump your knowledge

If you’re like most leaders your secret sauce probably isn’t documented anywhere. Your decisions, ways of working, the shortcuts you’ve developed that nobody else knows.. all of it lives in your head.

The fastest way to capture that valuable info is to simply hit record with an AI notetaker then talk through your workflow, decisions, and the way you think about solving problems.

Take that transcript and feed it into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. With a few prompts, you can structure the brain dump into SOPs, playbooks, or docs. Suddenly you’ve bottled the tribal knowledge that makes you, your team, and your company tick.

Putting this into action

Record yourself walking through one core workflow this week. Upload the transcript to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Ask it to structure the process into a step-by-step playbook with inputs, outputs, and decision points. Share it with your team for feedback and to add any missing pieces.

Start with champions & off-the-shelf

The worst thing you can do is force AI adoption on skeptics. Start with the early adopters, the ones already tinkering with tools on their own. Measure both time saved and engagement. Real stories of employees finishing more work with less effort is what converts the skeptics.

Also, validate the value of using AI first by using something off-the-shelf. Show the wins and then decide if custom is worth it. One client was agonizing over whether to build a custom knowledge retrieval system from scratch, I told them to stop. Don’t worry about perfection, focus on proof and value/impact.

Putting this into action

• Identify a couple natural champions in your team/company/org (this might be you). Pick one workflow to automate. Collect stories and results from using AI and share them broadly to raise awareness/excitement/adoption.

• Pick an off-the-shelf tool and try it out. Define what “proof” looks like. Maybe it’s hours saved, adoption, or satisfaction. Use the results to make a case for custom when the time is right.

Chain agents to act, not just answer

You don’t need to be technical to build/use agents. I’ve mentioned Zapier, Make, Lindy, and n8n a couple times already. They make it super easy to connect your knowledge to the tools you already use. Lots of folks want to leap straight into using AI to disrupt their industry/change the game. Out the gate, the initial gains come from doing what you’re already doing faster/more efficiently.

Try taking your transcript from the brain dump exercise I described above and pick some repetitive work that eats up a couple hours of your week. Wire up some basic AI-powered automation or creating a few agents. Let AI handle the busy work while you focus on the more important stuff. Make sure to set it up so you can review/refine until the kinks are worked out. Little pro tip, use an LLM to help you write the instructions for the agent.. don’t try writing it all out from scratch.

In one session, a client was stunned to see how quickly we could stand up an agent trained on their public website data really quick using off-the-shelf tools. It wasn’t perfect, but it instantly gave their sales and support teams leverage. Plus it also created a real data trail of the questions people were asking which is gold for marketing and CX.

I know that not every leader has the time or interest to wire all this together themselves. Jump on Upwork, hire a freelancer with a 100% rating, and have them set up working automations within a couple days. Sometimes leverage is just knowing when to outsource.

Putting this into action

• Identify 3 tasks you waste time on every week. Use Zapier or Make to connect your core tools (Slack, email, CRM, spreadsheets, or whatever you’re using everyday) with clear triggers and outputs. Add a review step so you can approve results before they go live. Test, tweak, repeat.

• Use a website copilot tool to spin up an agent in under an hour. Give it to your team to query while you wire in private data later. Review the questions being asked to spot blind spots in your content.

Wrapping up

The people I see killing it with AI right now aren’t chasing futuristic moonshots. They’re shipping small, practical experiments to free up hours each week and reinventing how they work in real time. The AI efficiency advantage won’t last forever. In a year or two, it won’t be optional. But today, it’s still an edge you can grab if you’re willing to move.

The companies that will win in the next 18 months aren’t the ones who wait for a perfect strategy. They’re the ones who are willing to experiment, measure, and reinvest.

Momentum beats perfect plans every time.

I know AI stuff can feel overwhelming, so here are a few tools to try out and get started this week (p.s. I’m not getting paid to share these, just trying to make it a bit easier for you to get going):

• Lindy.ai - Digital employees (i.e., agents + automation)

• Fyxer.ai or Cora - Email inbox assistants

• Scribe - Use AI to create documentation & SOPs

• Autotab or General Agents - General purpose agents

• Tavus - AI humans

• String - Prompt to build agents

• Veed - Video generator

• Attention - Agents that learn from your sales conversations

Onward & upward,
Drew