Lia (00:01)
The jury is in and AI is not necessarily cheaper than humans. So, what does that mean for you as a leader? Does it mean you give up on AI full sale? Just go back to having your people do everything? Does it mean you continue down the road of figuring out where to use AI? Yeah, I hope so, right? Today on the show, we are going to talk all about how to figure out the right places to utilize AI now that we know it's not a wholesale cost savings initiative.

This is gonna be a really important conversation for folks that have started to dabble, maybe for folks that are wanting to pull back a little bit, and everybody in the middle. So this is going you are not gonna wanna miss.

At the beginning of the year, there was almost an arms race to figure out how we can get rid of employees faster, right? How can we downsize, automate, you know, just free up everyone's time, figure out, you know, no more admins, no more marketing, no more this, no more that. And someone like me looking at team dynamics, I was like, gosh, this is not looking good. It's it freaked me out. And you know, last year I talked a lot on the show how I've really encouraged folks to slow down.

Think about what made sense to automate. This year I've gotten really deep into cloud code, utilizing it to build solutions for my clients, to give their team members superpowers, not replace them. And right now, where it stands, I find it to be a breath of fresh air that we're able to have the conversation again. So I want you to feel a little bit at ease that, you know, if you don't have a strategy yet, you're you're really like not too late because some folks.

That went kind of like full speed ahead, kind of without a strategy just on jumping on the bandwagon, are having some real ramifications from a cost perspective, from an inefficiencies perspective, from an output perspective, that we actually are those are not the intended consequences of utilizing AI. So we this is a great moment to kind of like say, okay, where are we at? What makes sense? How do we up-level our teams?

AI is the same as so people using the internet years ago or using a computer. We have it as a tool. It is going to be a part of the equation. It's not really something you can opt out of, but should it replace every single task and responsibility in person? Does every business need a chief AI officer? No, I don't think so. Especially my small business owners listening. You have a gym or a store or a small social media agency.

No, I don't think you need a chief AI officer and a bunch of MacMenny's. I just I don't think so. Now, larger companies, larger teams that are really thinking about it as, you know, a whole division of their team or department. Yeah, that makes sense. But we don't all need to do do the same thing. And when we when it comes to AI, it is another tool. And it's thinking, where does this tool make sense? Now, a lot of us found it really useful.

For replacing copywriting, writing, research, kind of like all this sort of like stuff that some of that's useful and some of it replaced all the thinking. And there is study after study that the more we're utilizing LLMs, so whether that's Claude or Chat GBT or Gemini or whatever it is to help us formulate our ideas, the less easy it is to think of ideas without that help. And so now in fields like education, they're pulling back from allowing folks to use it.

And I remember this is exactly what it was like when I was in college and Wikipedia came out. And it was like, gosh, it's replacing libraries or everyone's making stuff up. They're just finding it on Wikipedia. Well, that was the growing pains at first. And now Wikipedia has all cited research and it's all like kind of figured their stuff out. So there's there's these natural ebbs and flows, but what we have to do as leaders, what you are being tasked to do is to first understand.

Where AI can fit into your day-to-day business, into what you're doing, into your team. And then more than that, this is the biggest point. If you take away one thing today, you have to give your team members time to learn it and implement it. I was on a consult a few weeks ago with an agency that wanted to bring me in to do a boot camp teaching their team members AI and getting some custom cloud skills set up. So we were mapping out that plan and

The the the head of ops there said, Well, you know, we only want to do this in one day because people need to get back to work and they need to like, you know, not spend any time learning this. And I said to her, Hey, you know, I get it. And I move fast and I can give your team in one day a lot of you know, a really strong foundation of knowledge. But to think that they're not gonna have to take any additional time to learn this, you know, it would be doing you a disservice if I told you that was the case. And so I told her what I thought was realistic.

That yeah, doing a one day boot camp to get folks up to speed. We've built out a couple custom clawed skills. That's a s an awesome foundation. But ongoing, because of the pace at which these tools are evolving, every freaking day there's a new upgrade to the models and the features and all the things. It is critical that you give your teams, no matter what kind of business that you're running, no matter what kind of company you're in, you've got to give your teams regular.

touch points and routinely to be learning these skills, to be learning the tools, to be thinking, okay, well, that changed now. How do I fit this into my workflow? That is not a one-time thing. That is an ongoing thing. So that's one of the things where instead of thinking, okay, I'm just gonna replace, you know, all this stuff with with a agents and bots, okay, maybe you didn't do that. But how are you carving out, you know, it could be as little of an as an hour a week?

maybe an hour or two to give your team members dedicated time to be upskilling themselves. Because that is how they're going to utilize the tools to then give themselves superpowers. That is how you're going to give one person hours and hours of time back. And take for example, right now I'm building a, an app for agencies, marketing and advertising agencies called Agency OS.

This is designed to sh streamline the whole discovery process, right? You bring in a new client and you have to get to know them and your team members are sifting through docs and annual reports and competitive analysis and all this stuff. It's maybe taking them 10, 20 hours to get up to speed. Maybe that's across multiple people. I know agencies that are spending about $10,000 to $15,000 in this discovery process for every single client. Googling things again, like trying to piece things together.

This is a fantastic, fantastic thing that AI could be used for. And that's what I'm building right now. It's not to replace those team members, it's to shortcut that upfront work that people were spinning their wheels on and maybe coming to the wrong conclusion about anyway. Right? Because maybe they Googled something and they actually found the wrong doc or whatever. It's not actually the conclusion the company wants you to come to. So pulling together information quickly, extracting the most salient points.

Starting with, well, here's some things that are incongruencies with the client so that we can address that in the marketing or opportunities based on that client's niche or vertical. This is great capabilities of AI. And that's why I'm building this tool for some of my clients. Now, the piece here is they did not decide, I'm going to get rid of my account managers and replace it with agency OS.

No, this is the thinking of here are the challenges that my account managers are facing, even when we've done training, even when we've tried to make this easier, and we're spending a lot of money and no one is actually kind of like benefiting from doing this work. That is the starting point. That's how I said, this is a really clear problem that an AI tool can up level that person's understanding, up level their output. Now that account manager can learn from a synthesized place.

And they can get up to speed quickly on what that client needs so that they can design the creative. Agency OS does not replace creative, it does not replace ideation. It gets them to the starting point faster. So I share that because that's an example of how I took a clear client need. Discovery was costing us $10,000 to $15,000 each project. It's costing our team members 10, 20 hours.

at the beginning, they clients are waiting for us to get started faster. This is a real bottleneck. That was the origin of that. Another client came to me and said, Hey, we have a person doing marketing. They're struggling with it. They're kind of sitting there at spinning their wheels, coming up with idea after idea for the email marketing, for our newsletter, for social media, and they're getting stuck. The person likes marketing. They want to be doing it. I can't afford to hire an agency right now. I need to up level that person.

That's another fantastic use for cloud skills. Right. We can pull together ideas. We can take what's working, what's not based on their past emails. We can make a custom skill, which is what I did for that client, so that that team member can be unlocked in the places they're struggling. Okay. We still didn't say, this is autumn, awesome. Let me automate it, get rid of that team member, and you have like a robot doing your newsletters.

I think we need to have the human intervention. We need to have humans review. We need, we want to have a soul to the work we're putting out there, especially if it's creative work, especially if it's work you're sending to your clients or customers that is supposed to represent your brand. You want to have someone looking at that. But there was there there's a starting point. There's a problem that we're solving. And what I think it's it's frustrating, it's scary, it's all the things.

Is moving to people are complicated and they're challenging and they get defensive and they want more money. And I don't want to deal with any of that. So I want to automate it because I don't want to deal with people. I mean, okay. And there's gonna be huge businesses. I think there's already, I live in San Francisco, there's a new freaking unicorn popping up every single day. There's gonna be businesses that have one, I think they're saying there's gonna be the first like one person.

billion dollar company. That's gonna be that's realistic. Is it your business? If you're listening to this, you manage a team. So probably not yours. Is that the business that you want? You and a bunch of agents? Okay, maybe. Well that's not the the that's not really the the expertise I have is how to set up a bunch of agents. It's about how to up level your team. If you have a business or a service or work in an environment with other people.

I don't know if the end goal is replacing everything with agents. It's not my goal. So again, that's why I'm not talking about this on the on the show. Talking about how do we up level the people that we have so that they feel supported and seen and we don't decide, I'm just gonna get rid of that person because I don't want to deal with them. If we don't want to deal with that person, it's an opportunity for us to learn how to give feedback or an opportunity to look at well, is this person right for the team?

But not wanting to deal with it, that's not leadership. That's not why you have a team. That's not why you're building a business. Not wanting to deal with it is not the answer. And hearing this so often because I know people are freaking hard. I know it. I don't want to deal with it either, but you just do, right? Because we are humans and we want to interact with society. We deal with it anyway. But to make it easier, I put together a free conversation guide that goes through five of the stickiest situations.

From someone showing up late all the time, or it's feeling like it's disrespectful to maybe someone's attitude shifted, or you have that high performer that you don't want to lose, but you you can't really promise them stuff. So you're avoiding talking to them, whatever it is. Five conversations where we get the most stuck and we kick the can down the road and we avoid it. Well, the free guide gives you the exact scripts of what to say so you can have the conversations before it's too late. And the reason I built the exact scripts was because.

I I wanted to give you something vetted by a person that's had these conversations before, right? So you're not just asking, you know, Chat GBT without the context. So grab the free guide, LeahGarvin.com/slash convo, because the reason you don't have people on your team shouldn't be cut be because you didn't want to have a conversation. We can make that conversation easier. And once you have the tools,

In the scripts, right? You're having these conversations and you're giving the feedback and you're giving the recognition. Now your team members are here, they are invested, and now they're even more open to having conversations about how do they utilize AI? How do they understand? What time are you carving out? Are they using it in the right way? These are the conversations that become so much easier to have. So we don't want to avoid talking to people because they're complicated. That is not what we signed up for as leaders. But

We can make all of this easier by getting training, by giving our team members space to learn, by getting the free conversations guide so it doesn't feel so confusing and hopeless.

All of this is about, you know, everything that I talk about on the show is about making managing easier. And there are pieces of management that can be easier with a number of tools. But I fundamentally do not believe that we should have a workforce consisting only of agents because people are too hard to deal with. I think it's on us to figure out how to deal with them. I don't right. Because it's like we don't not get into

Romantic relationships because people are hard, because that's where you get the most stressed out over people. We don't not have kids if we want to have kids because kids are hard. That's that's some of the hardest points of your life if you're a parent. We don't not have friends because they might say something that you don't like. So why are we opting out when it comes to our workforce? I don't get it. Well, I do get it because it feels like, my God, like it's so hard. I get why, but I don't agree with.

And I don't think it's the answer. So if you're if you are thinking of that because people are hard, then have the conversations. Grab the free guide at Leagarvan.com/slash convo. If you're thinking of AI because you want to save money because people are expensive, we're learning it's not always cheaper. So now we go back to: well, how is our team being run? Is there duplication of efforts? Do people working on the same thing? Do people understand priorities?

Are we spending too much time in meetings, going nowhere, right? This is where we go back to our foundations. Every single thing I talk about on this show, we look at our systems. We look at how our team is being run. Those are the places that we save time, whether it is with people or agents. That is where we claw back hours. That is where we turn our teams into something that is costing us money, to something that is making us money.

It always starts there because you cannot replace the day-to-day operations with agents if you do not understand how your team is running. You gotta start there. Literally. I mean, like otherwise you have no idea what to tell an agent to do. You can't guess. So that's the starting point. And I wanna encourage you, you do not have to figure that out alone, but you do have to figure that out.

And that's what I'm here to help you with. I have countless episodes of Managing Made Simple where we talk about the systems that help you scale, get out of the weeds. Figure this out. And if you want support, you know who to call, reach out at Leagarvin.com/slash contact. We can figure out where does it make sense for agents to plug in? Where does it make sense for some automation, some claude skills? Where does it make sense for just to get some ducks in a row, meeting agendas, clarity on rules, responsibilities, like some foundations.

Foundations. And I always start there because literally I have seen every single time I've talked to any business owner or any team leader that is ch struggling with anything we talk about on the show, there are some shifts we can make immediately to free up time without any change of anything else. Whether it's like we talked about the last few weeks, figuring out how to delegate, whether it's what we talked about weeks ago with snippets.

Knowing who's doing what and are people working on the right things, whether it's people needing to feel recognized and seen, whatever it is, we've got to know what we're working with in order to understand what changes to make. And that is where you start literally saving those hours, bringing so much more revenue into your business, into your company, because people are focused on the right things. All right. If you need support, reach out. I'm always here to help.

And I really encourage you to think about okay, where am I getting stuck? Where am I tempted to start replacing some humans with robots? Where am I tempted? And go back and look. I have an episode on every freaking team challenge under the sun. Go back and listen. And if you are, you know, I send an email with every podcast, if you're on my list, reply and tell me what are the challenges that you have been thinking about. Or again, reach out, Leagarvin.com slash contact.

What are the challenges that you've been thinking about replacing people with with agents or automations or considering it or wondering if it would help? Share them and I can tell you where an agent or AI would support and where there's likely a team system, a conversation, a something under the hood that you could do immediately without even needing that second piece. Just worth worth thinking about. All right. We are going to get through this together.

AI is not necessarily cheaper than people, so we still gotta deal with our people. And I'm gonna help you through that every step of the way. See you next time.