Coffee With Dave

I hadn't seen Dave (not his real name) in a while. But when he called, I knew what it was about. He was about to get married.

So we sat down for a coffee to catch up, with a beautiful view over the beach. It started with wedding plans. It didn't stay there. He asked what I was doing these days.

I told him I work with small and medium businesses, helping them save time and do better with the tools of today. So many of them are still caught up in the tools of yesterday.

He thought of AI straight away. And he told me he didn't want to touch it. In his line of work, accounting, plenty of people have landed in legal trouble for using it.

I understood completely. The early adopters trusted it too much.

Why They Got Into Trouble

So I told him it was always going to happen that way. AI is a useful tool if you let it be one. The people who got burned didn't understand what it actually is, or how it works.

So I explained it to him, plainly. It's an answer machine. It produces things similar to what it knows, but not the same. As I walked him through it, he saw exactly why those accountants had come unstuck.

A Few Simple Ideas

Then I gave him some simple ways he could use it himself.

Dave is a sole operator. He gets a lot of phone calls. I told him an AI voice agent could take those calls, send the important ones through to him, and handle the bookings and the small questions people ring up about. They'd get their answers almost straight away.

He sat with that for a second. "Wow, I'd get a lot more work done because I wouldn't get interrupted so much."

"Yeah, of course."

Then we talked about building tools. He was worried the AI wouldn't give him the same answer every time. "Well, that's by design," I said. But you can have it build you something that does. A spreadsheet, or a tool with a set calculation that runs the same way every time. You put one number in the top, and out comes what you need at the bottom.

His eyes lit up. He leant in. "Wow. I never thought about those things."

"Yeah. That's why I come in and help businesses think about these things." Sometimes I implement them. Sometimes the owners do it themselves.

But it's not just AI. It's the way you use it. It's the things you choose to do. There are good tools that have nothing to do with AI at all. Anything that helps a business run better is already out there. You just have to know it exists.

By the time the coffee was gone, Dave wasn't wary of it anymore. He was enthusiastic, turning over what his business could become.

That's what I like most about this sort of work... talking with owners, finding solutions that they never would have found on their own, and knowing that they now have more time for their family, themselves or to simply go out and serve more people.