Are You Automating the Wrong Things?
You’ll have had this recently. You need something sorted, so you go to a company’s website and get a chat window. It asks how it can help. You tell it. It offers you three articles you’ve already read, then asks whether that solved your problem.
Twenty minutes later you’re typing AGENT in capital letters at a machine that appears to have been designed specifically not to understand you.
Now think about what’s going on inside that same company. Somewhere behind that chat window is a person trying to remember the right way to process a refund, because the process lives in a document written two years ago that nobody opens, and because the person who genuinely understood it left in March.
That’s the wrong way round. We’ve automated the conversation and left the process to human memory.
It should be the other way about.
Machines are outstanding at doing the same thing accurately, every single time, without getting bored, distracted or fed up. People are outstanding at reading a situation, hearing what someone actually means, and knowing when a rule needs bending. Somewhere along the line we handed each of them the other one’s job, and then wondered why customers were irritated and staff were fire-fighting.
What most owners call a system
Ask a business owner about their systems and you’ll usually get pointed at a folder. A process document written eighteen months ago by someone who has since left, sitting on a drive nobody opens, describing a way of working that has changed twice since.
That isn’t a system. That’s a description of one.
A real system is something that happens whether anyone remembers it or not. If it depends on a person being organised, having a good week and not being off sick, it isn’t a system. It’s a habit. And habits are the first thing to go when the business gets busy, which is exactly when you need them most.
Every owner I’ve worked with already knows they should systemise more. Most haven’t. Not because they disagree, but because writing systems is dull, and because for years the software that would actually run them cost more than the problem was worth.
That excuse has quietly disappeared. Here’s what I mean by that.
My own practice
Everything I know about a coaching client sits in several places at once. There’s a database with the core information. Shared documents covering their long-term goals and the actions they’ve committed to. Then a pile of things that arrive as we go: a P&L, an organisation chart, a set of numbers from six months ago, and much more besides.
If I’m honest, I could hold about a fifth of it in my head. Reading all of it properly before every session simply wasn’t possible. There aren’t the hours in the week.
Over the course of about a month, I built a system with Claude to deal with it. Or Claude built it with me. I’m still not entirely sure which of us was in charge, and I’ve stopped worrying about it.
Every weekday morning it looks at my calendar, works out who I’m seeing, and matches them against my client list in the CRM. Then, one client at a time, it goes through everything. The latest version of their plan. What they said they’d do since we last spoke. Any emails between us since. The transcript of our last session, which records itself. All of that becomes a briefing document for each client, telling me what I need to make sure I cover.
Afterwards it goes back over the session, finds anything I committed to, and puts it in my calendar.
Note what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t coach anybody. It never speaks to a client. It does the remembering, and I do the conversation.
“So how much time does that save you?”
Colleagues ask me this, and the honest answer is either several hours a week or none at all.
None, because I wasn’t doing it before. Not properly, not all of it. Nobody could. There’s too much, and something always came up. What I did instead is what every experienced person does. Turned up, leaned on memory and judgement, and did a good job.
So the difference isn’t hours on a timesheet. It’s that I walk into every session genuinely prepared, and things don’t fall between the cracks. My clients get my best preparation every time, not just in the weeks when I happened to have a clear Monday.
That’s the real measure, and it isn’t the one people expect. It’s not what you stop doing. It’s what you finally start doing properly.
I’m building the same thing for other parts of the practice now, with the intention that eventually the whole business runs end to end this way.
Now put that behind your front line
I’m not special, and neither is coaching. Every business has the same shape of problem. Information gathered and then lost. Steps that only happen when someone remembers. Preparation done thoroughly in a quiet week and skipped in a busy one.
So picture the opposite of that chat window.
A customer rings. A person answers, because a person always answers. And in front of that person is everything the business already knew and had scattered across six places. What was ordered, what went wrong last time, what was promised, what’s still outstanding, what usually happens next and how it should be handled. Nobody assembled that page. Nobody had to remember to.
Then the person does the bit only a person can do. They listen, they judge, they sort it out, and they sound like they care, because they’ve got the headroom to.
That’s the swap. Point the machine at the process and the person at the customer, then give the person the machine as well.
And the process runs to the same standard on a wet Thursday in November as on the best day you ever had. Humans are magnificent on a good day and merely adequate on a bad one, which isn’t a criticism, it’s just what being a person is. A system doesn’t have a bad day, and doesn’t get distracted by the fire that started at eleven o’clock.
The bit most people are missing
Used casually, AI is a decent tool. Handy for drafting a document, tidying a proposal, getting you off a blank page. Genuinely useful, and it’s where most people stop.
Get into it properly and it stops being a tool at all. It becomes a way of rebuilding how the work actually happens. That used to cost a fortune and was mostly available to companies with a consulting budget the size of a small country. Firms are already appearing that do nothing else, which tells you where this is going.
Get started!
None of this happens because somebody read a blog and nodded. Pick one person, ideally the curious one rather than the most senior one, and make this properly theirs. Give them real time to learn it, not an hour squeezed in on a Friday afternoon. Then have them start small, on something dull and repetitive that has a number attached to it, so you can see what the time invested actually bought back. Get two or three of those running and paying for themselves and the appetite takes care of itself. The businesses that come unstuck with this won’t be the ones that picked the wrong tool. They’ll be the ones still thinking about it.
