Owners ask me this quietly. Employees ask me this on the first break of a workshop. Same question, different fear.
Are business owners actually trying to replace people with AI?
The ones I work with are not. What they say, almost word for word, is some version of "I want to grow without bringing on more people" and "I do not intend to let anybody go." Those two sentences describe most of the small and mid-sized companies in Minnesota right now. They are busy, they cannot find good people, and the people they have are stretched.
AI, for them, is how the same ten people handle the work of fifteen. That is not replacement. That is relief.
What does AI actually take off people's plates?
The boring hour. Every job has one. The customer service person who re-types the same cancellation into three systems. The bookkeeper keying invoices by hand for four hours a day at month end. The warehouse guy walking the floor pulling packages that were cancelled after they were printed. The salesperson researching a lead for forty minutes before the first call.
Those are the hours AI is good at, and nobody is going to miss them. What is left is the part of the job that needs a person: the judgment call, the angry customer, the relationship, the thing that is weird this time.
So what is the robot suit thing?
It is how I explain it to a room. There are two ways to think about a robot in your business. One is a robot that does the job instead of the person. The other is a robot suit the person climbs into, that makes them faster and stronger and lets them lift things they could not lift before. Same technology. Completely different company.
I only build the suit. The person stays in it. They make the calls. They hit send. They are just suddenly very hard to keep up with.
Where does replacement actually happen?
Two places, honestly.
- Jobs that were already just typing. If a role is one hundred percent moving data from one screen to another, that role changes. The person usually does not get cut, they get the next job that was never getting done. But the owner has to decide that on purpose.
- Companies that rush. The ones who buy a tool, fire the team, and then discover the tool cannot handle a Tuesday in March. Those companies end up hiring back at a worse rate and with a worse reputation. I get called after.
How do I bring AI in without a panic?
Do it with the team, not to them. The workshop is a day in a room with the people who do the work. Their jobs go on the wall. They point at the parts they hate. They rank what gets fixed first. By lunch the fear is mostly gone, because they can see that the thing being automated is the thing they were complaining about last week.
Then you say the sentence out loud: nobody is losing their job over this. If that sentence is not true, do not have the workshop. Figure out your real plan first.
Answered by Jared Lukes, Minneapolis. Twenty-five years in brand, UX, and technology, currently holding fractional AI and technology seats at three companies. About Jared.