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Key Takeaways Write down the three things in your business that only a human should ever do, and say them to your team before you spend a dollar on software. Then hand the machine the tedium.
Done right, AI isn’t how the layoffs start; it’s how the judgment work finally gets room to breathe. The best AI companies will not be the least human.
When I stood up at our all-staff meeting to announce that B:Side Capital was adopting AI, I came armed with a deck about efficiency and the future of work. The first hand up ignored all of it. “Is this how the layoffs start?”
I don’t remember exactly what I said back. I remember the silence before I said it.
Here’s my situation, so you know where I’m coming from. I run a nonprofit lender that specializes in Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, and I started a another company, Main & Machine, that builds AI systems for small businesses. I sit on both sides of this: the owner buying the technology and the builder shipping it.
From both chairs, I can tell you the software is never what decides whether this works. Most owners spend months comparing tools and pricing tiers while their team quietly decides whether to trust the whole project. The team decides first, every time.
The fear isn’t some quirk of your shop, either; 52% of U.S. workers worry about how AI will be used in the workplace, according to Pew Research Center.
I assumed the answer was better training, maybe a slicker tool. Wrong on both. What worked was doing the whole project in reverse: Before AI touched a single workflow, we decided what it would never touch.
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