179 | Why So Many Female Founders Get AI Automations and Agents Wrong, And the Simple Fix Waiting for Your Attention | Leadership, Delegation & Systems with AI Frameworks

Do your AI Agents suck? Or have you been avoiding creating one?

Here's the uncomfortable truth: AI isn't the problem.

Your foundation is.

In this episode, Dawn pulls back the curtain on one of the biggest misconceptions female founders have about AI automation, AI agents, and business systems. While everyone else is promising that AI will magically save you time, Dawn shares the truth most people skip: AI doesn't fix broken systems. It accelerates them.

If your SOPs are fuzzy, your data is scattered, and your team relies on tribal knowledge, adding AI won't create efficiency. It'll create faster chaos.

You'll learn how to determine whether your business is actually AI-ready, where to start if it isn't, and how to build AI-powered systems that save time without creating expensive headaches.

Want a place to test ideas, ask questions, share wins, and learn how other founders are using AI without breaking their businesses?

Join the AI for Founders Community on LinkedIn.

It's free, practical, and filled with founders figuring this out together. The community is designed specifically to help business owners integrate AI strategically instead of chasing shiny objects.

What You'll Learn

• Why AI readiness is a systems conversation, not a technology conversation
• The 3 levels of AI every founder should understand
• Why messy data creates expensive mistakes
• The smartest place to start with AI
• The simple AI readiness test every founder should do today

Resources

• AI for Founders Community

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Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She' s That Founder
179 | Why So Many Female Founders Get AI Automations and Agents Wrong, And the Simple Fix Waiting for Your Attention

In this episode, you'll discover why adding AI to a business that isn't ready doesn't speed things up, it accelerates the chaos to light speed.

Hey, hey, hey. You're listening to She's That Founder, the podcast for ambitious female leaders who are ready to stop being the bottleneck in their business by using AI frameworks for faster delegation and decision making.

I'm Dawn Andrews, your host, and today you'll discover why AI readiness is actually a systems conversation, not a technology one, and what that means for where you'll start. You'll discover how to know if your business is actually ready to add AI before you waste a weekend building something that doesn't work.

And my favorite part, what AI can actually do for you once the foundation is in place, because when it's right, it is chef's kiss. Extraordinary.

Okay, so I'm gonna start with a confession. I was recently a guest on a podcast, The Women Who AI Show, with the brilliant Kelly Tenney, and we were talking about AI automations, agents, AI readiness, all of it.

And somewhere in that conversation, I said something that I've been saying in my coaching sessions for months, but it hit differently out loud on a microphone. And what I shared was, " If your business doesn't have its foundations in place, adding AI doesn't fix it. It just accelerates the chaos to light speed."

And I saw, or I guess heard, the host go a little quiet for a beat, because that's not the message that's currently out there. What is out there is, "AI's gonna save you time. It's gonna make you more efficient. It's gonna help you compete with bigger companies, free up your bandwidth." And all of that is true, and it's true conditionally.

It's true when your house is in order, and I don't know a single female founder who's been told that before she signs up for the Build Your AI Team in a Weekend course or the AI Chief of Staff course. And today that's what we're talking about, not the AI hype, the AI truth, and what your business actually needs to be ready, and then what happens when you are.

Because when you get there, I've seen it's amazing. So let's get into it. Here's what I want you to understand about AI, and specifically about the shift from using chat AI to using automations and agents. So there are three levels of this, and most people are only clear on the first one.

Level one is chat. That's ChatGPT on your phone or Claude in a browser tab, a chat bar where you put something in and get something out, vending machine style. And most of us are living here. It's useful, it saves time, it's honestly kind of magic. Chat is really fantastic. Level two is automation, and that's where one tool talks to another.

So you put something in Slack, and it adds it to your calendar, or you fill out a form, and it creates a task in your project management system. Automation is a step up, and it requires that tools are connected, usually via API or an automatic integration, but it's following a fixed set of rules. And level three is agents, and this is where the conversation is real.

An agent isn't following a fixed script. An agent is a thinking brain that you've given particular instructions to, that talks to your data, and then makes decisions about what to do next based on what it finds. It reads, it evaluates, it acts, and it does it on its own.

Sounds exciting? It is. Sound a little terrifying? Also correct.

Because here's the thing, when you take that agent's brain, that system that reads, evaluates, and then acts, and you point it at your business, it's going to find exactly what's actually there. If your data is organized, clean, and consistently formatted, it can do things in 30 minutes that used to take human beings months.

I have seen this with my own eyes. I'm working right now with some large fashion brands who are among the first to integrate serious agentic AI into their buying process. These are buyers who used to spend weeks, sometimes months, building out what they're going to order for a season, looking at historical data, what sold, what didn't, projecting forward, putting together a whole buy.

And with an agent trained on five years of clean, consistently formatted buying data, they can put in one command, and the entire buy can come out in a spreadsheet, top to bottom, in about 30 minutes. Yeah, that is extraordinary. That is the promise of this technology, and it is very But, here's the but, if that historical data wasn't clean and organized, if it wasn't formatted the same way across all five years, if things were named differently in 2021 versus 2023, if there were gaps or inconsistencies, the agent doesn't stop and say, "Hey, something seems off here." It will make errors at scale, at speed, and it does that in the same 30 minutes.

So the translation here, when your foundation is solid, AI makes extraordinary, inconceivable things possible. And when it isn't, AI makes your existing mess bigger, faster, and harder to untangle. Yeah. I mean, I just needed to be able to say this to you because I know some of you right now are nodding, and I also know some of you are starting to count in your heads, " Do I have clean data?

What is clean data? Do I have SOPs? Do I have any of this?" And if the answer is sort of, or mostly, or probably good enough, or it's in my head, then please stay with me because that's exactly who this, uh ... 'cause you are exactly who this episode is for. The bottom line here is AI isn't the variable, your foundation is. 

So let's talk about what AI readiness actually means, because I think the phrase itself sounds too jargony and intimidating, and it really doesn't have to be.

I'm not asking you to become an IT expert or to suddenly hire an IT department, and I'm not asking you to know how to build code. I'm asking you to look at three things. Do you have SOPs for the processes that you want to automate? And I know I said the SOP thing. Nobody likes them. Nobody wants to write them.

Nobody particularly enjoys reading them. But what I want you to understand about why this matters right now, an AI agent, an AI employee needs clear instructions, not general instructions. AI employees, AI agents need specific documented step-by-step instructions. This is the process. This is how we do it.

This is what we reference. This is what we want as the output. That's an SOP. And most female founders who've bootstrapped their businesses, their SOPs are stored in their own heads or spread amongst themselves and team members and held together, and I've said this before and I will say it again, by their hearts and by chewing gum and paperclips And this is said with love and not judgment, because it's not a character flaw.

It's how creative, driven, capable women build businesses. You figure it out, you hold it together, you iterate again, you scale. The challenge here, though, is that AI can't read your mind, and until you put what's in your head into a document, you can't really hand it off to a human or to a machine.

So the next question to ask to know if you are AI-ready, is your data organized and accessible? So whatever process you're thinking about adding AI to, automations or agents, where does the data live? And when I say the word data, I know some people are specifically thinking maybe social media analytics, or they're thinking of financial data. 

Data means anything. It's your reference material. So is it in one place or is it in seven? Is it in a variety of spreadsheets or databases or Word documents? Has it been cleaned up and organized, or are there years of iteration and done differently versions of where you've said, "I'll deal with it later," and it's just buried somewhere on computer?

This is the thing that the agents that you're building. Data is the number one reason AI agents don't work the way people expect them to. It's not AI, it's the data. And if you wouldn't hand a new hire a pile of folders from five different systems with inconsistent naming and say, "Figure it don't hand it to your agent

Okay, the next question to ask if you wanna know if you're AI-ready is do you have clarity on what you want AI to actually do?

And I get that this sounds obvious. It is not obvious. It really isn't, and it takes a lot of iteration sometimes to figure this out. What I see is a lot of founders who are attracted to the most exciting aspirational thing AI could theoretically do for them, and they start there. And I get it, 'cause that's super fun.

Why wouldn't you, right? So they'll build the whole AI chief of staff ecosystem, or they automate the most complex, high-stakes processes in their business, and I really do understand that impulse. You want relief where your pain is the greatest. if I could just recommend starting in the area where you have the most expertise, not necessarily the area that's the biggest headache, but

The area where you already know how things work, what good looks like, and what good doesn't look like, and that you also have some expertise to quality check it, I think that's the best place to begin. Because then when AI does whatever the thing is you're asking it to do, you can check the work.

You can see where it nailed it and where it missed, and you can give better instructions. You can improve the output over each iteration. You're building a skill and a system simultaneously. And if you start in your area of least expertise, the stuff you're relieved to hand off because you don't wanna think about it anymore,  you're gonna just have to AI's And trust without verification is where hot messes happen

AI readiness is, so to kind of sum this little nugget, this, to, so to sum up AI readiness, it isn't about the technology, it's about SOPs, systems, clean data, and knowing where you're starting and where you want to end up really clearly

Hey, quick pause. If what we're talking about today is resonating and you want a place to actually try this stuff, test prompts, ask questions, hear what other founders are doing, and not feel like an idiot while you're figuring it out, come join the AI for Founders community on LinkedIn.

It's free. It's full of business owners doing exactly what you're doing right now, figuring AI out in real time, being early adopters without blowing anything up, and building AI into their businesses in a way that actually works. So search AI for Founders on LinkedIn or grab the link in the show notes

So let's talk about what AI can actually do when you're ready. So i've given you the reality check. Now, I wanna give you the reason you're still in this. Because what happens when the foundation is in place, when you have your SOPs, your data is clean and organized, you know what you want AI to do and what you want it to deliver, and you're starting in an area you know real talk, it is magic.

I'll tell you what it looks like in my own business. I podcast twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, different formats, slightly different energy for each. Writing outlines, prepping scripts, making sure everything is on voice and on topic. That's a significant amount of work every week.

So I built a Tuesday podcast skill and a Thursday podcast skill inside Each one has all of my requirements in it built format, tone, structure, what I care about, what I don't, my stories, what I will say, what I won't say, and each skill has knowledge-based documents that it refers to when it writes.

So now when I'm prepping an episode, instead of starting from scratch, I give my skill the context, and it builds the outline. I refine and I record. We're not talking about replacing my voice or my thinking. It's still me all the way through. We're talking about cutting out the part of the work that I used to do manually every single day. And here's the thing, nothing breaks. If the output isn't quite right, I tweak the instructions and run it again. It's a safe place to test, to learn, to iterate, and those small skills became the building blocks for everything bigger that has come after. That's the model that I'm suggesting for you. You start small.

You start in your area of expertise. You build a skill that saves you or someone on your time on something repeatable and low stakes. You get good at reading the output, improving the instructions, and build trust and confidence in what it gives you. And to be real, that's the same thing you would do with an actual human, right?

And then once you have that buttoned up, you expand. So the fashion brand buyers I told you about, they didn't start with the full five-year data set on day They built a test version, like a little nugget, one small season, walled off, running in parallel with their human process. They checked the agent's output against what their buyers have done manually, and that's how you build trust in a system, and that's how you know when to expand it.

AI isn't the destination. It's a team member you have to onboard, train, and check in on just like any other. And team members perform best when they have clear instructions, good information and background, and someone who knows the work well enough to catch them and give them feedback and fix it when something's off.

You are that person. You've always been that person. AI just gives you a team member who doesn't get tired, doesn't get sick, and will work at whatever hour you happen to be up at, which if you're anything like the founders I know, is sometimes 3:00 AM We are early adopters over here for a reason, not because we love technology for its own sake, but because we've seen what's possible on the other side of doing this right.

And when this foundation is ready, AI doesn't just save time, it lets you compete at a level your business size has never had access to You can punch above your weight class, and it really an incredible experience to know that you can open up that much capacity because you have your foundations in and you have great AI tools that you can put to work.

Okay. Here's what I want you to walk away with. AI readiness is not about the tools, it's about the foundation your tools are standing on. If you don't have documented processes for what you're trying to automate and build agents for AI will be working from nothing. If your data is scattered and inconsistent, that beautiful new agent you build will make decisions based on incomplete information at speed, at scale.

And if you start in the area where you have the least context, you won't be able to catch the errors before they compound. And I don't wanna be, like, the nervous Nellie for you, but I don't want you to spend a bunch of time building out a system of AI agents that do work that messes everything up so you have to sort of disconnect, go back to ground zero and start over again.

It's incredibly frustrating and disheartening. But, when you get the foundation right, the ROI is The time savings are real. The ability to do things that used to require a team three times your size, that is real. So here's your action step, just one because,

girl, I know you're Pick one process in your business that you've been thinking about handing off to AI, just one in an area that you have expertise in. And before you build anything, before you sign up for another tool, just write down how that process actually works step by step. What triggers it?

What happens in the middle? What information is referenced? What does the output look like when it's done right? get it out of your head and onto a page. And you can use chat to help you with this. You can use your AI tool to help you get this out of your head and organize it. You can use it to ask you further questions to help clarify it even more.

You can ask, "If you were an agent that I was asking to do this, where are the holes in these instructions?" So you can get a reasonably done version of your SOP that you wanna build an agent for or a skill for really quickly. So that is your first SOP that I'm inviting you to build, and that is your AI readiness foundation, and it also happens to be the thing that would help you hand this off to a human, too.

So it is not wasted work no matter what you do. And if you wanna keep going on this, if you wanna be in a space where people are doing this in real time, asking dumb questions out figuring out which AI tool actually does the thing that they need and which ones are all hype, then come join us in the AI for Founders community on LinkedIn.

It's free. Full of business owners at every stage of this journey. You can search AI for Founders on LinkedIn or head to the show notes and grab the link there.

That is it for today's episode of She's That Founder. I'll see you on Thursday, and until then, go write that one process down.

Not perfectly, just honestly. That's where everything else starts because we're trying to get to that less, not more place. All right, see you soon.