It's Not Just a Smarter Google
If the most useful thing AI has done for your business is recommend the best place to take a customer for lunch, you’ve barely scratched the surface. That’s not a criticism. It’s where most business owners are, and it’s exactly where the opportunity is.
I was reminded of this recently, sitting with a long-time client who runs an independent auto repair shop. He’s sharp, experienced and, by his own admission, sceptical. He’d tried ChatGPT and Gemini. Ask a question, get an answer: a glorified Google. Useful, but hardly life-changing.
What I told him is what I want to tell you: we’re well past that. The real value of AI isn’t answering questions or writing an email for you. It’s taking work off your plate, streamlining how your business runs and keeping your costs down, without cutting the corners your customers care about.
If you can explain it to a person, you can explain it to AI
Think about how much of your day is spent in front of a screen and keyboard: emails, texts, sourcing parts, juggling schedules, delivering bad news when a six-hour job turns into a fourteen-hour job. A lot of that is important but repetitive, tedious and mundane.
Here’s what surprises people. Training AI to handle that work doesn’t take coding skills anymore. It takes plain English. If you’ve ever explained a task to a new employee, you already have that skill. You tell the AI what you want, who your suppliers and customers are and how you like things done. When it gets it right, you say “remember that as a skill.” Next time you just call the skill by name and it does the job. (I go deeper on how to choose and write that first assignment in Give AI a Job, Not Just a Question.)
And unlike a new hire, once it’s learned something, you never have to train it again. Its memory is better than yours or mine. It can read a 50-page PDF, look at a schematic or an image, and give you an answer in seconds. Over time it learns your business well enough to start asking, “Did you forget about this?”
Agentic AI: it works while you don’t
The term to know is agentic AI. Ordinary AI answers your questions. Agentic AI does work for you.
Today’s tools can run on their own virtual computer, with their own browser and files, without tying up yours. You hand them a task and they go away, do it and report back: “That thing you asked for is done, and here’s the result.” You can also put them on a schedule. For example: “Every morning at 5 a.m., check what came in through the website forms, sort it and give me a summary.”
They can even learn to use the software you already rely on. If you do it on your screen, an AI can be taught to do it on its own screen or yours. Look up a customer, check inventory, pull a report. Meanwhile, more and more of the software you already pay for is baking AI in directly. You can see where this is leading. We’re inches away from just creating our own apps to do exactly what we want. The specialized software you use now will increasingly let your own AI plug into it directly, for free or possibly for a usage fee.
I run my own business with AI agents. I have a roster of virtual staff, each with a job, and I can talk to all of them from my phone. Yes, talk, I don’t even have to type anymore.
Collaboration, not replacement
My client’s pushback was fair. He can look at a car and know before it’s on the hoist that the wiring harness is falling apart. Decades of experience, a gut feel for which customer will be trouble, and knowing which tech suits which job: no AI does that.
I agree, and I’m in the same boat. I’ve watched this industry go from Commodore 64s to where we are now, and that background serves me every day in ways someone in their twenties couldn’t match.
But that’s not the point. Nobody is asking AI to replace you. The question is how much of your day is spent on work that doesn’t need you. If AI takes on even 10 to 20 percent of it, that time comes back to you for the things only you can do. You add the human element wherever you want it. It’s a collaboration, not a hand-off.
Creep, crawl, walk, run
AI isn’t magic out of the box. Like a new employee, it needs to learn your environment, your rules and the quirks of how you run things. Here’s how I’d start:
- Measure your time first. I track every minute of my day, and AI turns it into a pie chart of where my hours actually go. It’s humbling, and it shows you exactly what to hand off.
- Pick the small, annoying jobs. Start with the repetitive tasks that eat your time: triaging inquiries, drafting routine emails, writing up in-house procedures as a knowledge page your whole team can use.
- Give yourself a learning curve. You’ll need time to get comfortable with the tools, but not a lot. I’ve taken other clients through this, and they’re not computer nerds. They’re people who built businesses.
- Expand as it earns your trust. Once one task works, you start seeing others. Your brain starts thinking, “AI could do that. Why don’t I delegate it?”
My prediction, based on what I’ve seen: within three to six months, you won’t understand how you ever worked without it.
Skate to where the puck is going
Wayne Gretzky said the secret to his game was thinking about where the puck was going to be, not where it was. That line has never been more relevant to business.
Costs are up, customers are cautious and some sectors are feeling real pressure. The businesses doing well in spite of it are the ones reading the situation and adjusting their game plan. AI has changed how I run New Phase beyond my wildest dreams, especially in the last year. Done right, it can do the same for you, not by chasing more revenue but by making every hour you work count for more.
If you’ve tried ChatGPT and thought “so what?”, let’s talk. I’ll help you find your first 10 percent. Get in touch with New Phase.