AI gave everyone a more interesting job than their actual job

It’s more fun to vibe code than to be on the phone with customers.

I think that idea explains a lot of what’s happening with AI inside many many businesses right now (and you Mr Business owner are the guiltiest of the bunch).

A salesperson can spend an afternoon calling prospects. Some won’t answer. Some will say no. A few will explain that they’re happy with their current provider, thanks.

Or that salesperson can spend the afternoon building a DASHBOARD!! in Claude.

The dashboard takes shape immediately. They can change the colors, connect another data source, add a feature. By the end of the afternoon, they have something they can show you. They learned something. They’re excited.

You can see why they’d choose the dashboard. I love playing with this stuff too!

But how many new customers did they talk to?

That question can feel almost rude after someone shows you what they built. They took initiative. They figured out a new tool. Maybe the dashboard is pretty good.

And now you’re the asshole asking about SALES.

As an owner, you’re going to have to get comfortable with that.

Before AI, there was a practical limit to how far someone could go with an idea for an internal tool. They needed a developer or budget or help from IT. Now they can get something working before lunch.

I want people experimenting. The person doing the work often understands the problem better than anyone else in the company.

BUT

Maybe they saved themselves twenty minutes and created another step for three other people.

Maybe they built a separate place to track information that somebody now has to reconcile with the CRM. Maybe they made a task faster that was already getting done on time.

You can have a whole company full of people making those improvements and still have customers waiting just as long.

Take an airline.

The planes make money by flying passengers and freight. The baggage crew supports that. You need bags loaded reliably so the plane can leave.

If someone shows you a new baggage-handling tool THEY BUILT WITH AI!!, you should be able to follow the explanation through to what happens to the flight. Does it leave sooner? More reliably? Can you handle more flights with the capacity you have?

That’s the conversation I want to have about AI.

Show me how your tool lets a salesperson run more appointments. Show me how it gets a permit ready before the plumber needs it. Show me how it prevents an order from sitting around waiting for somebody to notice it.

I can understand those improvements. We can measure whether they happened.

“Look at this dashboard I made” leaves a lot unanswered.

We’re working through this in our own business.

We are now restricting AI development to our centralized team.

I want people to prototype (and spot opportunities!)…..But when something is going into production, into the work our business depends on, it needs to go through our team, get hardened, and get off somebody’s laptop.

The prototype helps someone explain what they need. Before we depend on it, we need to understand how it fits into everybody else’s work.

And we need to account for the time spent building it!

A salesperson who spends three days finishing an app has spent three days doing something other than talking to customers (the only thing I actually need them for)

AI is turning people who should drive revenue or leadership (including YOU) into shitty part time developers.

If it starts to become a part of your business - its going to need to be redone by an adult anyway (ask me how I know).

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. We have officially “solved” this at Sagan… and I’ll be talking about it a lot in the next few weeks. Its not a new SaaS, or some upsell. It a different way to THINK about this (and then a ton of lessons learned from using it). We are FINALLY using a TON of AI every day at every level of the org (..and it was painful to get here).