Marcus writes a newsletter for his fourteen-person company every Thursday. And every Thursday it costs him his lunch break plus the commute. Two weeks ago he showed me his folder of half-finished drafts, eleven of them, each abandoned around paragraph three. His problem was never ideas. Content was simply the third job on his plate.
A founder I work with in Jaipur has a folder with nineteen logo files in it. Nineteen AI platforms he has demoed since January, each one pitched by its salesperson as “basically hiring a digital employee.” He has signed up for none of them. The demos were all impressive in the same way: a chat
Two Mondays ago, a friend who runs a nine-person marketing agency in Manchester showed me her screen. Two browser windows, two AI products. In the first one, an AI assistant had drafted a tidy client recap. That used to cost her an hour every week. Nice work. In the second window, an AI agent had
The near-miss that stays with me involved an invoicing agent, a twenty-two-person wholesale business, and a customer email list. The agent’s job was reasonable: chase overdue invoices, escalate after fourteen days, summarize collections every Friday. What nobody scoped was what happened when the invoice module misread a merged spreadsheet. The escalation step, built in a