How Family Businesses Can Win With AI

Everyone can get AI now, so “we’re using AI” isn’t a strategy anymore. After a talk with HR leaders at the University of Toledo Family Business Center, we’re stuck on a bigger question: what actually makes a family business or privately owned company win when the same tools are available to your competitor down the street?

We dig into the human reality behind AI adoption inside organizations. The CEO or president feels the urgency to drive strategy. The people doing the work feel the risk, and sometimes real fear, about what changes mean for their jobs. Then HR leaders, CHROs, and talent directors sit right in the middle, trying to translate vision into action while keeping trust intact. That tension isn’t a side note, it’s the work.

The heart of the conversation is knowledge versus information. Information is abundant. Knowledge is judgment, especially when the manual runs out and a decision still has to be made. That judgment lives in your domain intelligence: the hard-earned context in your people’s heads, the patterns your teams learned over decades, and the “moat” that helped your business survive tough cycles. We end with a grounded way to approach AI: go back to what made you successful, get clear on what makes you unique, then start small, earn early wins, and let the results compound.

Enjoying the show? Subscribe, share this with a leader in your organization, and leave a review with the biggest AI question your team is wrestling with.

I'm Craig Francisco, CEO of AI23. I help privately held and family businesses turn their hard-earned domain intelligence into an advantage AI can't hand your competitor down the street. If your team is wrestling with where to start, the best place to begin is a conversation: www.craigfrancisco.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, this is fresh, so I want to get this out of my head while I can. I just had an incredible opportunity to speak at the University of Toledo Family Business Center. This organization's been around since 1992. Services Northwest Ohio, uh southeastern Michigan. Really, it's a membership that provides value to family businesses and privately owned businesses in this region. It has like breakout groups. They do a lot for organizations, you know, providing as much benefit as they can. So today, Sarah Best and I were both asked to speak on a couple

Speaking At A Family Business Center

SPEAKER_00 0:43

different topics, and mine was again on AI and talking a lot about knowledge versus information. And the audience, there were roughly 15 to 18 companies represented, and they were CHROs or directors of talent, so very focused on human resources. So incredible uh group of folks, very engaged. And what really hit me during this presentation when I was talking is if you think about an organization right now, you know, that there's always a CEO or a president or somebody

HR Caught Between Strategy And Fear

SPEAKER_00 1:19

that's like trying to drive strategy, driving AI. Uh and then there's the people at the bottom doing the work. I don't mean like I say the bottom, but like production floor, the folks that are that are really grinding all day, and the ones that have to deliver uh to the customer, whatever that might look like, and they're scared to death, right? So the CEOs like driving, the people on the floor are scared, fearful for their jobs. And then you have the the HR leads, right? The people in the middle that have to manage both. What a challenging job that is, huh, in this day and age. Super challenging to take everything that the leader wants to do, but also cascade that down to a group of people that you know don't think that way and are fearful for lots of good reasons. So it was a it was a great opportunity. We talked a lot about how every organization has access to AI. But what's gonna make that organization win? What's gonna make that organization be more successful than their counter competitor down the street? And so we talked a lot about knowledge. It's that the ability to use judgment the right way. The what's made these family businesses successful for decades? The moat that they've created around their business, it's allowed them to be sustain decades in a lot of cases of existence, going through difficult

Knowledge Versus Information In AI

SPEAKER_00 2:57

times. It's not easy. And now you have AI coming in and a lot of pressure from the outside. So we talked so much about the value of understanding and capitalizing on your own domain intelligence. Everything that's in the heads of your people, you know, when the manual runs out of information and you've got to make a decision, it's the judgment piece, right? It's the it's the gap between where information stops and action happens. That's the judgment of the people. So super powerful. And I guess if the the message I want to leave here, as you look to adopt AI in the organization, ask yourself a very grounding question. You know, go back to the beginning of the business. What has made you successful? Think about that, the foundation that it holds this company up, holds your company up, that allows you to recruit, allows you to retain customers, get new customers, and grow. Whatever that is, you need to go back in that moment and understand it and know that that is what's going to make you unique. You layer AI on top of that, it'll amplify your

Grounding AI In What Made You Win

SPEAKER_00 4:13

ability through your people to do amazing things. It's this is not throw spaghetti on the wall, see what sticks, kind of a move. I mean, this is very strategic, very thoughtful. That's how you win. That's how you win. And I and I believe, you know, anyone that's in HR, head of HR, CHRO, they, you know, it it's in a lot of cases, it's it's not, it does fall fairly, unfairly on the shoulders of that leader to try to bring everybody to the table and have that proper conversation and get grounded on who you are, who you want to be, and then go in with AI. Start small, get some wins, you know, early wins, and then expand. That that whole model will compound, and you will definitely experience some amazing results within your business.