Filed under Process & Workflow.
Notes, numbers, and hard-won lessons from helping small and medium-sized businesses actually put AI to work. No think-pieces, no vendor takes — just what the math said after we ran it.
Bolt a motor to a line shaft and you’ve still got a line shaft
Paul David's 1990 paper explains why electricity took 40 years to show up in productivity statistics: factories bolted motors onto steam-era line shafts. AI seats on unchanged workflows repeat the mistake.
Your job was never typing
Jensen Huang says the task of your job and the purpose of your job are not the same. For SMB operators, that's the difference between losing your week to typing and getting it back.
Cuban’s right. The AI bill is for the workflow you never rebuilt.
Mark Cuban on Big Technology Podcast: F500s waste money on AI because they're running the business the way they always have. ROI comes from rebuilding the workflow on AI — not bolting AI on the old one. SMBs have the asymmetric advantage.
You can just install Claude Code tonight
You don't need a steering committee to use AI. Twenty dollars, one evening, and one workflow gets you further than a 90-day evaluation.
10 Hours Back Per Batch
A hospital association cut AP batch processing from 10 hours to minutes. The math on what manual invoicing actually costs a mid-size company is worse than you think.
The $174K Nobody’s Looking For: How Manual Processes Are Quietly Eating Your Payroll
Your 40-person firm is burning $174K a year on manual processes nobody tracks. Here's the math, why nobody does it, and what a realistic recovery looks like.