Have Better Problems

AI won’t solve all your problems, and that’s okay. Instead, if used correctly, it will let you trade one set of problems for another, which, hopefully, are better problems to have. This is true for any business initiative, whether it uses AI or not, but it’s worth internalizing:

• By automating drudgery tasks, it lets you trade the problem of “my best people are wasting time on manual data extraction tasks” for the problems of “I have to find productive things for my team to do now that they have all that time freed up” and “I have to maintain this automation tool”.

• By scaling up a process such as lead generation, you trade the problem of not having enough leads for the problem of having to follow through on all these great opportunities (but see the caveat below).

• By having AI reduce the amount of work required to produce a given output (whether that’s images, ad copy, or code), you trade the problem of being bottlenecked on creation for the problem of being bottlenecked by taste and good judgment.

Just make sure the trade is in your favour:

• Don’t trade the problem of not knowing what to write on LinkedIn for the problem of being viewed as a purveyor of slop.

• Don’t trade the problem of taking too long to write code for the problem of drowning in low-quality, brittle, vibe-coded spaghetti code.

• Don’t trade the problem of not having leads for the problem of being an annoying spammer.

Use good judgment. As long as you are upgrading your problems, you are making progress and coming out ahead.

So, what problem are you ready to upgrade?