EP 220 Navigating the AI Jungle: How to Avoid Traps and Thrive!

Wait.

Before you unleash AI onto your next workflow, the thing you need to ask yourself is, are you fixing what's broken or are you just creating another way to disappoint your clients?

This is something that's super important that I haven't really heard a lot of people talking about.

And that is just because you can add AI into something, does that mean that you really need to?

I have seen this time and time again where business owners think, what, we will just automate everything with AI and we'll make our business work so much easier.

But that actually is not the truth.

Yes, AI is an amazing tool, but that's what it is, is a tool.

And if you use a tool the wrong way, you're going to get the wrong outcomes.

That's why you need operations professionals to be able to help in your business if you are looking to add an AI or if you are an operations professional.

This is why it's important for you to know the tools and know how to think strategically on and how to actually implement those tools.

Just because we have AI that's around to help us streamline our business, make things work so much easier, get things done so much faster.

I've seen so many times where business owners will start to implement AI and then it kind of blows up in their face.

So let me give you a few examples.

There was a membership owner that we were working with that they decided to add in AI into everything into their business.

So all of their workflows, all of their client experience, there were so much AI that that was built into it that they ended up having to raise the price of their membership because AI was costing them so much.

So that's one way that using AI maybe was something that they didn't think about when they started putting everything in, where if they had an operations professional to then come in and look at their business and look at strategically this is how you're going to implement AI, they would have had a much different experience.

Another example that's really tempting.

A lot of platforms I'm seeing lately are starting to add in their own AI agents.

So that way you can tell it to do something and it will just go and do it and build it for you, which sounds amazing, but if they are building something that maybe is going to be hurtful to your business, they are just going to build it and they're not going to be able to look at it and analyze and say, is this something that's very helpful for your business?

For example, we had a client that was creating a membership again that had a cancellation process.

They had their AI agent go out, create a whole process for cancellation, and everyone got an email that then said that their membership was canceled and canceled all their payments because that's part of what the workflow was supposed to be.

So that caused lots of loss of revenue.

They had to go back to their clients and to have to ask them to like resign up and everything.

So that caused a huge headache.

You want to make sure that as you are building out your AI workflows, you are thinking through the strategy behind it and you're making sure that this is a process that you are building that is not going to ruin the rest of your business.

AI is great for automating processes, but.

But it can't think strategically.

It can automate invoicing processes, streamline client onboarding, optimize scheduling systems, but when you start losing clients, that's where these things can be alarming.

Here is what AI can't see.

AI is incredible with the tactical optimizations, but it is terrible at the strategic implementation.

AI sees individual processes with where humans are going to see all the ways that that process is interconnected with all the rest of the systems at a business.

The future belongs to those who can think strategically, that know how to optimize with AI and know what things that AI should never touch.

I'm going to give you three ways that you can think through a project or a problem that you're having in a business to see if AI is the right solution for you.

Before you go in and implement.

The first thing you need to do is to clarify the core problem.

Before choosing AI as a solution, we need to look at what the actual problem is.

Is it a process problem?

Is it that system is not working the way that we hoped that it would?

We need to understand what the actual problem is, what the root of that problem is.

That way we can see, is this a process that we need to revamp or would AI just make this better?

I look at when we add AI into a process or into a system that all that does is it just brings fuel to the fire.

So when we're adding in all of these different processes and then we put AI into it, if the process isn't put together correctly, we are going to create a much bigger headache than we would if we would not have added an AI.

So make sure that you identify what the the problem is first and that you have a clear process and the process is working before we want to automate it or add in AI to help with that process.

The second thing to think about is, is your team ready to take on having AI as part of your business?

If you have a team that has not really been studying AI, they don't know a lot about it, and you bring in someone to implement AI into your business, that's great.

But if something breaks, who's going to fix it?

We want to make sure that our team is equipped with the right tools and the knowledge to be able to manage this AI.

It's just like bringing in another employee.

You want to make sure that you know how to work with that AI, because AI is great, but there are times where it answers things wrong or it does something a little bit crazy.

And if there's something that needs to be changed, that someone knows how to go in and update that.

Let me give you an example.

I was working with a client that wanted to have a website all built out with AI, which is amazing what AI can do when it comes to website building.

So they built out this beautiful website.

It looked great, we had it all set up for them, and then a few months later, they wanted to have someone on their team go in and update it.

Well, it's not like a normal WordPress site or something that we are used to where we can just go in, go into a text editor and change something.

They had to go back to the person that built it and then say, hey, I need this changed.

So that's something that if they had someone in house that knew how to do that, they could just go in and change it.

But we are learning this whole new way of doing business when it comes to AI.

So you want to make sure that your team is prepared or that you are prepared to help a business owner that you're working with to make any of those changes and help support all along the way.

The third thing is making sure that your AI solutions are meeting strategic objectives.

So having KPIs looking at all of these things, is AI the right tool for this?

Just because you can add it doesn't mean that you should.

It makes me think of the days of MySpace where you could add in all of the animations and you could change your cursor to have, like sparkles that go across the screen and you have all these things, all the glitter and everything that are, like, coming at you.

Just because you can add it doesn't mean that you should.

And that's exactly what I'm seeing right now in the industry with AI, is that just because we can add AI into it doesn't mean that we actually should add that.

So you want to make sure that you have specific KPIs that you have set and you know strategically why you're adding AI if you don't.

If it's just because AI is cool so we should add AI into it.

That is actually not a good enough reason.

We need to think strategically around this AI and also think as we grow and scale in our business, is this going to cost us more?

Because the price of AI, depending on what you're doing, it could be really, really high.

So you want to make sure that the cost of AI of what you're implementing is actually going to be worth it in the long run.

When I think of scale and I'm doing something, especially when it comes to clients, I think if this will work for 100 clients, what would that do for our business?

Now let's say that we had a thousand clients.

What would that do to our business?

We what if we had 10,000 clients, what would that do to our business?

So if you start thinking bigger and bigger, that's how you can start reverse engineering this and seeing how is this really helping us in a strategic way.

That is going to free up time.

That's really when it comes down to all of this, AI is made to free up our time.

It's made to take tasks that may be a little bit tedious, that we can automate and it can do it so much faster.

The other day I was actually talking with my kids and we were talking about how much AI has actually changed the things that we do and how quickly we can get things done.

In one day, I was able to create an entire workflow, email sequences, landing page, thank you page, checkout system, everything.

And I did it all within about three hours before AI.

That would have taken at least two weeks and probably two other team members to help me be able to put that all together.

So AI has definitely taken our time and been able to condense that so we can get more done.

But we want to make sure that we're doing the right things, not just adding an AI because it's a new fancy thing.

Don't make your business look like an old school MySpace page.

We want to make sure that we are meeting the needs of our clients and we aren't just creating AI traps because that's the thing that's cool.

Right now.

Navigating AI and operations is a whole new world.

So there's a lot that we can talk about.

This, if you want more videos like this, make sure you put that in the comments.

I actually am doing a training coming up about how you can start implementing AI into your business strategically.

So if you are interested in joining that training, it's a free training that we're doing.

The link is in the description below and we'll see you guys all on the next video.

Keep thinking strategically.