Why companies struggle with AI-powered scalable systems

In this episode of Automate Your Agency, Micah and Alane break down the five hidden roadblocks that stop companies from scaling — even when they’re investing in AI. From leadership confusion and tool overload to the danger of siloed systems and bottlenecked knowledge, they reveal the patterns they’ve seen across hundreds of businesses (and lived through themselves).

You’ll learn why solving small problems first beats chasing big, complex AI projects — and how to design systems that scale without adding chaos. Whether you’re a founder, operator, or department lead, this episode will help you identify where your company is stuck and what to fix first.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth.

0:00:09 - (Alane): Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. Micah, I love what you have put together and communicating with people on like really the topic is how to build scalable systems. And so I thought it'd be awesome if you went through the five things that companies struggle with.

0:00:35 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. I mean we've seen, I would say we compiled this over like the last six years of interacting with businesses and even stuff that we've done ourselves. Right. That we struggle with ourselves, even scaling our last business. So maybe, maybe it's the last 22 years of being in business and, but more particularly with this, and we talked about this in our last episode, AI is allowing technology.

0:01:06 - (Micah): Forcing technology might be a better way to say it, to change so quickly that there are these big gaps, there's these issues that we see almost across the board right now. And so the first one is leadership, strategic confusion. And it is people understand like, hey, we need to use AI. But the number I would say, I don't know, maybe you hear something different. Alane. But the number one thing that I hear is love the concept of AI.

0:01:37 - (Micah): Want to use it, no idea where to start.

0:01:40 - (Alane): Oh yeah, absolutely. And they're all on different pages on what that could look like. So maybe they could do this, maybe they could do this. Well then you kind of feel a little ping ponged.

0:01:54 - (Micah): So strategically, leadership teams and businesses are really struggling to understand where to start, what's possible, what's not possible, all that kind of stuff. Which leads to the next issue which is simply a leadership gap because there's the lack of understanding of what AI can do, should do, will be able to do what it can't do, what the limitations are.

0:02:23 - (Alane): Absolutely. I mean, yeah, just thinking about agents and you know, we've been using agents for almost a year now and how even that concept of having AI agents from a leadership level is still extremely unfamiliar to them. And so you might have one that's been reading some things, others that have no idea what we're talking about. And so really for them to understand from a leadership position what could be implemented in your company to use AI to automate work. So there's just a huge gap there.

0:02:58 - (Micah): Yeah. And I would add part of this gap is things are different now, obviously we know that. But when you develop software, you try to solve a big problem, you go through a lot of development you go through prototyping, you go through all, all of these development heavy phases. You hire a team, you have all of this happening. The thing that's changed with AI, and more specifically AI agents, is don't solve the big problems, solve all the little ones first.

0:03:31 - (Alane): That one's been. I love that.

0:03:34 - (Micah): I don't know how to say it any different, but that is the crux of everything. If you're trying to solve a big problem with AI agents and you're building complex workflows and you've got all these things going, it is going to take time. How many of the small things? So if we think about it, impact, effort, right? Do you solve 50 small things or one big thing? And that's what you have to measure. And I would say nine times out of 10, solving the 50 small things are going to have a multiplier of positive impact over a 1x multiplier. Solving the one big thing that then still needs to be maintained, that still everybody still needs what to do. And you have all this training, whereas while you're doing small things, you implement, you quickly train, you don't have a lot of maintenance and management.

0:04:26 - (Micah): And eventually you can execute. Yes, and execute faster. And eventually you can tie all those small solutions together, which is what we didn't have in the past either. That's why you had to build a big solution with software developers. Now it's like, oh, I built five agents. Well, wouldn't it be cool if one agent could talk to another agent? Hell yeah, it can. And they could. And that's an iterative step versus this big monolith solution.

0:04:54 - (Micah): Anyway. That's probably a whole episode in itself.

0:04:57 - (Alane): Probably. So this one is such a big thing, because even I was at an event yesterday with business owners and they all know what I do. So some of them were like pulling me to the side to have a conversation about, do I think that an agent could do this? And I kept thinking in every single one of those conversations, they were talking about very complex things. And I'm going, there are probably a hundred operational things you could do tomorrow that would make an impact on your company. And you are only thinking about this giant, complex thing that is an unknown, if it could even be done.

0:05:36 - (Alane): Why are you even talking about that? There are absolutely things in your company that could be utilizing an agent to make things more efficient, more consistent, more cost effective, all those things. So I think this one really is a big one, because I see people in leadership making this more difficult than it needs to be.

0:05:56 - (Micah): What is one Thing completely agree that could completely agree.

0:06:01 - (Alane): Your team is made up of operations. That's how your company runs. Even you answering emails is an operation. So let's talk about one thing that can make the day easier.

0:06:10 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. I mean, and even internally, like I use this example in a lot of the leadership workshops that we've been doing now, Alane, is the reason I can be here chatting with y' all for three hours without worrying about what slacks are coming in on my phone is because we probably have at any given time, 20 to 30 agents that are powering our operations. Not one agent, not one huge solution. We have podcast agents, we have podcast topic agents, and we have solutioning agents, and we have email triage agents, and we have project management agents.

0:06:48 - (Micah): But they are all small solutions that fill in the gap and give our teams the ability to do their jobs better so that they don't have to ask me while I'm in a three hour leadership workshop.

0:07:01 - (Alane): Well, nobody slacks you, Micah.

0:07:04 - (Micah): Well, now you're really, really calling me out here.

0:07:08 - (Alane): All right, all right, we can move on.

0:07:11 - (Micah): Tool overload. This is a big, big one, right? What should I use? I'm already using Google Workspace. Should I just use Gemini? And I think there's just such a problem here and almost it's like option paralysis.

0:07:30 - (Alane): Yeah, a little bit of a ping pong too. I have a weekly call with somebody and they're like, have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this? It is. There's so much coming out. There's so many things out there, but a lot of people aren't even skilled at the one thing yet before they're jumping to the next thing. Having a few tools, I think is because there's certain tools best for the job, but you don't need to be inundated with everything all the time.

0:07:59 - (Micah): Yeah. And that's the way to solve this, Right? Again, if you're looking at very small things to solve, you look at what is the best tool for the job. If you start looking at things like, well, we're using Midjourney, well then. And we're only going to use Midjourney for AI image generation. If you have a use for that, then you're. You're basically setting yourself up for failure across all those smaller jobs or smaller objectives that you're trying to achieve.

0:08:28 - (Micah): That need things that would be like quick AI photo editing or things that involve words in the AI generated image. A better solution would be Nano Banana. But if you're saying across the board, we're only using Midjourney then you're already creating this uneven playing field for your team. So do you need to have more subscriptions? Do you need like we have whole episodes on what's the right tool for the job. Don't be scared of software subscriptions because especially right now, the best tool for the job with the best integration, best that can tie to eight. Like all of these things start to tie together anyway. That's probably another episode in itself.

0:09:13 - (Alane): All right, Micah, the next one. Siloed implementation.

0:09:17 - (Micah): Yeah. So this is Wild west versus operationalizing your systems. If everybody is just off doing their own thing, cool. Maybe that works as your pre growth before you want to mash the gas. If that. If you're running a wild west operation and you try to mash the gas, it is like your throttle is completely disconnected from your fuel line. Nothing is going to happen. It is just going to hit the bottom of your car and that's it. Like you're not going to go anywhere because nobody's going to know how anybody is doing anything. There's no standardization, there's no centralization, there's no operationalization and it's going to be a huge issue.

0:10:05 - (Micah): So siloed implementation is fine for testing, it is not fine for scaling.

0:10:11 - (Alane): I've been even, you know, I do a lot of speaking at HR conferences with SHRM and this knowledge sharing, if your company isn't championing it that you know, let's share what we're doing and talking about things then creating your own pods of people to do knowledge sharing with. I mean Micah, we're starting to do a mastermind on that to be that for other leaders so that they can be learning and you know, where we're going through and learning some of these tools and explaining the best tool for the job and and really creating a community of people that want to do this knowledge sharing. But if you don't have access to that, then starting to build your own within the industry that you're in.

0:10:56 - (Alane): And maybe there's multiple, you know, you might want to be in. If you're in HR, you might want to be in an HR one, but you might also want to be outside of an HR one because you might be also a leader in your company and so really starting to talk about these things. And I think that's what Micah helped us so early on with AI is that we were just such a like forefront support of our team using it and sharing how they were using it. And that's just on the chat base we've like Chat, GPT and things like that. We have now made an agent for helping our team use and build agents. Like we are eating our own dog food or drinking our own Kool Aid. Whatever you want to say is that this is at a core of what we do with our team.

0:11:40 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. And. And I think, you know, we're starting to use the term, like, how do you operate a business in the AI era? A lot more than we ever have before, Alane. And I think this, all these things that we're talking about is that this final one, scalability crisis, if you have bottlenecks. So if we take a step back before AI, before all this stuff, the way that things typically worked is you had people that were in a company for a long time, might be the founder, might be sales director, might be, you know, a project manager that's been there forever.

0:12:15 - (Micah): They are the linchpins to operations. They hold the knowledge. They know everything about the clients. They know everything about the products. They. And I'm saying everything generously because there's still an information bias that happens where we're only going to remember certain things and come forward with certain things. So there's still a filter that happens. But there were bottlenecks that occurred in each of those situations.

0:12:47 - (Micah): We want to scale up the sales team. Well, the sales manager's the only person who knows how to quote this correctly. He's on vacation. Guess what? No quotes are coming out. We've got a bottleneck. We want to hire more account managers. Well, guess what? The, you know, lead account manager who has done all the clients up until we started scaling, scaling, the team knows everything about every client and it's all in her head.

0:13:14 - (Micah): Well, no other account manager is going to be able to open up that brain and get that information out in real time when they need it. It has to be when that account lead account manager is available. And if she's not available, everything comes to a halt. It's that gas pedal thing again. You're just not going anywhere. And so the only way to solve this, which is one on one side. Amazing that we have this capability now that we can solve this.

0:13:44 - (Micah): It used to be you've got to get it in a knowledge base, but then nobody wanted to read anything. Well, people will chat. People will chat with AI. They love chatting with AI for the most part. It's easy to train and it's easy to build and it's easy to take that data that would be previously stuck in people's heads and put it into a Google Drive folder. And attach that to an AI friendly database and allow your team to chat with it. And then it's real time access to this data 247 or even without chatting with it, you could streamline that in automated workflows and still have agents have access to that data that we need to make similar decisions.

0:14:24 - (Alane): So I get asked Micah, like, where do I see AI going? And one of the things just I keep going back to is, okay, what does it look like for a company that does not start really using scalable AI systems that we're talking about? There's one side where there's things that say, you know, there's going to be companies of one that have a billion dollar company because they've got agents working for them. That is a company of one with massive margins.

0:14:51 - (Alane): But I think there's going to be another side to that where if you're not doing these things, you're not going to be able to afford to scale. So you are going to be a company of one because you have the knowledge, but you aren't implementing the technology. And so you're only going to be a coach or a consultant at the end of the day without a team of agents being able to execute the work. So you're really going to be limited to what you can do in a day.

0:15:18 - (Micah): And the reality is, the reason there isn't a company of one that's making a billion dollars right now is because the technology is not there. That makes headlines. That is not reality today. Okay, so Those are our 5 AI powered scalable system problems that we see today. If any of those resonated with you, listen to our other episodes, reach out, ask questions. But at the the first thing that you want to do is just recognize that you might have one or two or five of the five of the problems and start tackling these. Because the sooner you tackle these and the sooner you resolve these, the sooner you can stay competitive because your competitors are resolving these as you listen to this.

0:16:03 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources or visit our website at biggestgoal.ai for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:16:29 - (Alane): Bye for now.