“That’s not a warning about technology. That’s a warning about speed.”

I've been in IT for well over 20 years. I've seen the “this changes everything” announcement more times than I can count.

Sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it absolutely did.

The stakes, as plainly as I've heard them

AI is the second kind. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, put the stakes as plainly as I've ever heard them: “Your company is not going to go out of business because of AI, your company is going to go out of business because another company used AI.”

That's not a warning about technology. That's a warning about speed.

Two shops on the same street

Think about it like this. Imagine two shops on the same street selling the same thing. One owner hires an extra person to handle the phone, write the quotes, and follow up with customers who went quiet. The other owner is still doing all of that himself, the same way he always has.

Same market. Same product. Very different capacity.

AI is that extra person, and right now the hire is cheap enough that almost any business can afford it. The question isn't whether you can. The question is whether you will, before the shop across the street does.

Start with the boring stuff

What I've found so far in my own work is that the highest-value starting point is almost never the flashy use case. It's the thing your team does repeatedly that is mostly information shuffling. Summarising meeting notes. Formatting data from one system into another. Writing the first draft of something that always ends up looking the same anyway.

Those are the tasks where AI earns back hours fast, and fast wins matter early because they build the confidence to try the next thing.

Nobody needs a roadmap to start that. They need to recognise a “time-suck” in their day or week. What do you do on a regular basis that would be great to hand off to an assistant? That answers the most important question: “why?” This quantifies your ROI by defining how much of a difference it will make in your day, and don't underestimate it. That thing that takes an hour a week is worth 50 hours a year to you. Now you have an actual dollar value, the same way my own AI Transition Framework ROI calculator turns that math into a number a client can see before we ever talk pricing.

The companies that will look back on 2025 and 2026 as a turning point aren't the ones who had the best strategy deck. They're the ones who started. If you've got a time-suck you've been meaning to hand off, that's exactly where I'd start too. You can find the details on the contact section of this site.