AI Zeus: God of Productivity

I’ve been running my business for more than 30 years.

During that time, I’ve hired people, trained people, delegated responsibilities, managed contractors, and occasionally wished I could clone myself.

I’ve also spent an extraordinary amount of time doing things that, frankly, somebody else should have been doing.

Not because those things weren’t important. They were. But because when you own a small business, you wear an awful lot of hats.

You’re the CEO, the sales department, the marketing department, the customer service department, and occasionally the janitor.

And if something breaks, guess who gets the phone call?

Now imagine having an extraordinarily intelligent assistant who never gets tired of researching, organizing, analyzing, writing, planning, or tackling the thousand little tasks that consume your day.

Better yet, imagine that assistant could recruit other specialized assistants, coordinate their efforts, and bring the finished work back to you.

Welcome to the emerging world of agentic AI.

Or, as I’ve started calling it, AI Zeus: God of Productivity.

From Asking Questions to Getting Things Done

Many business owners are familiar with ChatGPT by now.

You ask it a question. It gives you an answer.

You ask it to write an email. It writes an email.

You ask it to summarize a document. It summarizes the document.

That’s useful. Sometimes astonishingly useful.

But there’s an important distinction between an AI that tells you how to accomplish something and an AI that actually helps accomplish it.

Suppose I ask: “How should I improve the marketing for my business?”

A conventional AI conversation might produce a perfectly reasonable list of recommendations.

Improve your website. Publish useful content. Build an email list. Optimize your Google Business Profile. Analyze your competitors.

Wonderful.

Now guess who has to do all that work?

Me.

Agentic AI changes the conversation.

Instead of asking for a list of things I should do, I can begin assigning actual work.

“Review my website. Identify the most important improvements. Research what my competitors are doing. Prepare a prioritized action plan. Draft the first three articles. Organize everything in my project management system.”

I’ve written before about giving AI a real job rather than just a question. This piece is about what sits above those jobs: one coordinating layer directing specialized tools.

Depending on the tools, connections, and permissions available, an AI agent can carry out substantial portions of that assignment rather than simply describing the process.

And that’s a fundamentally different proposition.

We’re moving from artificial intelligence that provides information to artificial intelligence that helps execute work.

Meet My Three AI Powerhouses

In my own business, New Phase Marketing Intelligence, I’ve been experimenting extensively with three major AI platforms.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.

I don’t treat them as interchangeable.

Each has different strengths, capabilities, personalities, and limitations. Those differences can also change as the technology evolves.

Sometimes I use one to research a subject, another to challenge the conclusions, and a third to help turn the resulting ideas into something useful.

It’s a little like having several highly intelligent colleagues around a conference table.

Except the conference room is my computer, the colleagues are software, and nobody complains about the coffee.

What makes this interesting is that I don’t necessarily want to become an expert in every individual AI product.

I want to become an expert at getting useful work accomplished with AI.

That’s an entirely different skill.

And increasingly, I want these systems to work with the tools and information I already use to run my business.

Which brings me to Zeus.

Somebody Has to Run Mount Olympus

In Greek mythology, Zeus was king of the gods.

He wasn’t the only god. Far from it.

There was Athena, associated with wisdom and strategy. Hermes, the messenger. Hephaestus, the master craftsman. Apollo, associated with knowledge and the arts.

Each had a domain of expertise.

Zeus sat at the top of this rather unusual organizational chart.

Now imagine that structure as a modern AI-powered business.

You have one primary AI interface through which you communicate your goals and priorities.

Behind it, you have specialized AI agents, applications, databases, and software tools.

One researches. Another writes. Another analyzes data. Another manages a workflow. Another prepares a report.

Your primary AI helps coordinate the activity.

That’s my vision of AI Zeus.

Not one magical system that knows everything and does everything perfectly.

Rather, an intelligent orchestration layer that can bring together different capabilities and direct them toward a common objective.

Think of it as a command centre, the idea I explored in Build a Command Centre, now viewed through the Olympus lens.

Instead of constantly jumping between applications, copying information from one screen to another, and trying to remember what you were doing fifteen minutes ago, you increasingly manage work through a conversational interface.

You describe the outcome you want.

The system helps determine the steps, selects appropriate tools, and carries out the work it has permission to perform.

You remain the boss.

Zeus may be king of Olympus, but in my business, he still reports to me.

Give Hercules the Heavy Lifting

Of course, having a brilliant strategist doesn’t accomplish much if nobody actually does the work.

Enter Hercules.

Strictly speaking, Hercules wasn’t one of the original twelve Olympians. But for our purposes, he’s exactly the fellow we need.

He was famous for performing twelve extraordinary labours.

Cleaning the Augean stables. Capturing the Ceryneian Hind. Defeating the Nemean Lion.

Not exactly the sort of assignments you’d find on a typical Monday morning.

Although, come to think of it, cleaning up some of the databases I’ve encountered might qualify as a thirteenth labour.

In my AI analogy, Hercules represents the agents and tools that actually execute tasks.

Zeus coordinates.

Hercules gets his hands dirty.

Imagine asking an AI to review a customer database, identify duplicates, organize the records, and prepare a clean version for your approval.

Or research a hundred potential customers, categorize them by industry, and prepare a personalized outreach strategy.

Or examine your website analytics, identify pages that are losing traffic, and propose specific improvements.

These are the kinds of multistep assignments that agentic AI is beginning to tackle.

Some can be automated extensively. Others still require supervision, judgment, and manual intervention.

And that’s important.

Because giving Hercules a job doesn’t mean you should let him demolish the village.

A capable AI system needs boundaries, permissions, checkpoints, and a clear understanding of when to ask a human for approval.

Especially when money, customer information, public communications, or irreversible decisions are involved.

The goal isn’t to remove human judgment. It’s to stop wasting human judgment on work that doesn’t require it.

Even Zeus Needs a Good Memory

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way.

AI can be astonishingly intelligent and still forget something important.

You can have a brilliant conversation, develop an excellent strategy, and produce a remarkable piece of work.

Then return later and discover that some crucial detail has disappeared from the conversation.

That’s not a great foundation for running a business.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that businesses need to separate their permanent information from the AI systems they use to access and work with it.

Your business knowledge shouldn’t exist exclusively inside one chatbot’s memory.

It should live somewhere you control.

That might be Notion, Obsidian, GitHub, a structured database, or your own private server.

The particular platform matters less than the principle.

Own your information. Organize it. Make it accessible to the AI tools you choose.

I’ve also written about why locked-up business data is such a wasted asset in Your Data Is in Prison.

In my business, I’ve been using Notion as a central repository for projects, research, articles, and operational knowledge.

The objective is to create a durable source of information that different AI systems can work with.

If I decide to change AI platforms tomorrow, I don’t want to lose thirty years of business knowledge or six months of accumulated research.

I want to unplug one tool, plug in another, and keep moving.

Think of it as building Mount Olympus on land you actually own.

The gods can come and go.

The mountain stays.

The Small Business Advantage

Here’s where things get particularly interesting.

For decades, large corporations have enjoyed advantages that smaller businesses simply couldn’t afford.

Research departments. Marketing teams. Data analysts. Software developers. Administrative support. Dedicated project managers.

A small business owner might need all those capabilities but have the budget for only one or two employees.

AI doesn’t magically eliminate that economic difference.

But it can narrow the gap.

One capable person, supported by well-organized AI tools and agents, can potentially accomplish work that once required a much larger team.

I find that enormously exciting.

Not because I want to replace people.

Because I want to remove some of the limitations that have traditionally prevented small businesses from competing with larger organizations.

Imagine a talented tradesperson who is excellent at their craft but struggles with marketing, administration, and technology.

What if they could have an AI assistant helping with customer inquiries, scheduling, estimates, marketing content, and business analysis?

Or a small professional services firm that could automate much of its document preparation, research, and administrative workflow?

The owner still needs to understand the business.

The professional still needs expertise.

The customer still deserves personal attention.

But the amount of time spent on repetitive administrative work could shrink dramatically.

And that creates room for something precious.

Time to think.

Time to serve customers.

Time to develop new ideas.

Maybe even time to go home at a reasonable hour.

What a radical concept.

Don’t Worship the Technology. Learn to Use It.

I should probably make one thing clear.

Despite the title of this article, I don’t believe artificial intelligence is divine.

It makes mistakes. It can misunderstand instructions. It can produce confident nonsense. And agentic systems introduce additional risks because they can take actions, not merely generate words.

The more responsibility you delegate, the more important oversight becomes.

But there’s another mistake I see people making.

They spend so much time debating which AI platform is the smartest that they never get around to doing anything useful with any of them.

It’s a little like arguing about whether a Ferrari or a Lamborghini is faster while you’re still walking to work.

Pick a capable tool.

Learn how to use it.

Give it a real problem.

See what happens.

Then improve your approach.

You don’t need to understand every technical detail of artificial intelligence to begin benefiting from it.

You do need curiosity, patience, a willingness to experiment, and enough judgment to recognize when the machine has gone off the rails.

And you need to invest some time in training.

I’ve been using these systems extensively, and I’m still learning something new almost every day.

That’s part of the attraction.

The technology keeps evolving, and so does my understanding of what I can accomplish with it.

Your First Assignment for Zeus

If you’re a small business owner wondering where to begin, here’s my suggestion.

Don’t start by trying to automate your entire company.

Start with one recurring task that consumes too much of your time.

Maybe it’s preparing customer follow-ups.

Maybe it’s researching competitors.

Maybe it’s organizing project information.

Maybe it’s producing a weekly marketing report.

Write down what the finished result should look like.

Then ask your AI to help you design the process.

Find out which parts it can actually perform with the tools available to you.

Keep a human approval step where it matters.

Document what works.

Repeat.

Once you’ve built one reliable workflow, build another.

Before long, you may discover that you’re no longer merely chatting with artificial intelligence.

You’re managing a growing collection of digital capabilities that can help you accomplish real work.

And that, to me, is where things get exciting.

The View from Mount Olympus

I’ve spent much of my career helping businesses use technology to become more effective.

Websites. Search engines. Digital advertising. Automation. Analytics.

Each wave of technology has created new opportunities.

But agentic AI feels different.

It’s not simply another application to learn.

It’s the beginning of a new way to interact with all the applications we already use.

Instead of adapting ourselves to the software, we’re beginning to teach the software what we want to accomplish.

The implications for productivity could be enormous.

Will it all work perfectly tomorrow?

Of course not.

Will we encounter frustrating limitations, spectacular failures, and the occasional digital equivalent of Hercules accidentally knocking down the barn?

Almost certainly.

But I wouldn’t bet against the direction we’re heading.

After more than three decades in business, I’m still looking for ways to work smarter, accomplish more, and spend less time wrestling with technology.

And now I have a new kind of management layer.

I call it Zeus.

He has access to some remarkably talented colleagues.

And I’ve got a few labours lined up for Hercules.

Let the gods get to work.