Perspective
AI rarely replaces people
Someone asked us recently, only half joking, whether AI was going to make half their team redundant.
It is an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. Which is: almost certainly not. And also, not quite in the way the question assumes.
Because when you watch what people actually do all day, very little of it is the thing on their job title. Most roles are a thin layer of judgement wrapped in a thick layer of repetition. Copying a figure from one place to another. Checking whether the thing that usually happens has happened. Making the same small decision, the same way, for the four hundredth time.
AI is far better at replacing repetitive decisions than the people who make them.
That repetitive layer is what this wave of AI is genuinely good at. Not the judgement, the repetition around it. Which sounds like good news, and mostly is, though it comes with a quieter risk.
It is tempting to point these tools at the visible, human parts of a business, the writing, the talking, the deciding, because that is where the impressive demonstrations are. In our experience that is usually the wrong end to start. The real value is duller and further back: in the repetitive decisions nobody enjoys making and nobody will miss.
So we’ve found the better question is rarely “what can we automate”. It is “which decisions are we making again and again, the same way, that never really needed a person”. Answer that honestly and the technology part is almost an afterthought.
Used well, AI doesn’t shrink a team. It hands them back the hours that were quietly disappearing into work no one would ever defend.