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Every founder I talk to has an AI strategy now. Almost none of them can tell me what it’s actually saved them. That gap is the whole story.
I’ve spent years running operating businesses across advertising, healthcare and technology infrastructure, working with ad budgets in the tens of millions along the way. Different industries, same problem underneath all of them: most of the work inside a growing company is repeatable, and most companies still solve repeatable work by hiring a person to do it by hand.
That’s the actual cost center. Not slow software, not weak talent. Just headcount sitting atop a process nobody bothered to automate.
There’s a habit most growing companies fall into without noticing. Volume goes up, someone feels the strain, and the default response is to post a job. Nobody stops to ask whether the strain is actually a headcount problem or a workflow problem wearing a headcount costume. Those are very different problems with very different fixes, and only one of them shows up permanently on your payroll.
Before I approve a new hire now, I ask one question. Is this job mostly judgment, or mostly repetition? If it’s judgment, I hire. If it’s repetition, I automate it first and see what’s left over. Most of the time, what’s left doesn’t need a full-time person attached to it.
Three examples
In one advertising business I’ve worked with, campaign reporting used to require someone pulling data from several platforms into a weekly deck by hand. We built a pipeline that pulls the same data automatically and flags anomalies instead of just reporting numbers. The hire we were about to make never happened.
In a healthcare growth operation, client onboarding used to run through email threads and a shared spreadsheet, with someone manually checking every new account for missing paperwork. We automated the checklist and the follow-up emails. Onboarding got noticeably faster and nobody had to pick up the slack manually. Nobody lost a job. We just never added the extra coordinator we were about to bring on.
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