What I Got Wrong About AI.

Your most important business assets are relationships. AI can help you hold them. Not replace them.

When I started experimenting with AI, I was looking for efficiency.

That is the honest answer. I wanted to move faster, do more, cut the time it took to get from one thing to the next. I had the same instinct most people have. This was a productivity tool, and productivity was the point.

I also had a quiet fear underneath it. That if AI got good enough at the operational side of business, it would start to replace the human side too. That relationships would get thinner. That the part of the work I had always valued most, the reading of the room, the conversation that shifts something, the trust built slowly over time, would get optimised out.

I was wrong about both.

AI gave me more attention for the room, not just more output

The efficiency came. But that is not what changed things. What changed was presence.

When the administrative weight of a client relationship, the notes, the follow-ups, the remembering of what was said three sessions ago, stopped being something I had to carry personally, I had more of myself available for the actual work. The conversation. The listening. The moment when something real surfaces and the only thing that matters is being completely there for it.

I had spent years watching good practitioners spread themselves thin across too many clients, threads and details to hold. Relationship quality can suffer when operational load takes too much attention away from the people involved.

AI did not give me more human capacity. It gave me back some attention: less energy spent searching for the last note, more available for judgement, listening and the conversation in front of me.

Use it carefully. Check the notes before you rely on them, handle client information appropriately and keep human judgement in the process.

The market is going a different direction.

Most of what I see being written about AI and business right now is about efficiency in a different sense. Fewer people, lower costs, automated contact, transactions that used to require a human now handled by a system. The relationship is being treated as overhead. Something to reduce.

I think that is a serious mistake. Not a moral one. A commercial one.

The businesses that use new tools well may use the saved attention to strengthen delivery, expertise and the human side of the work.

AI can support better follow-through when it is used with care. The test is whether it helps people be more prepared and present, not whether it creates the appearance of attention.

The version of AI adoption that is already going wrong

There is a version of this I have already seen go wrong.

Tools can make documentation and follow-through easier, but they should not become a substitute for addressing an important conversation with a co-founder, client or team member.

The risk is not that AI automatically makes business less human. The risk is using any tool to avoid the work that still requires a person.

The test is not simply whether you are using the tools. It is whether the conversations that matter are happening, and whether the tools support rather than displace them.

Technology has always been about the relationship, if you let it be

Twenty years ago it was a CRM that remembered what a client’s kids were called. Today it is a system that notices the pattern building across six sessions and puts it in front of me before I walk back in the room.

The tool changes. The purpose does not: use it to support attention, preparation and follow-through, while keeping human judgement in the loop.

Further reading: Keep Client Knowledge in the Business and The Conversation You Keep Avoiding.