Automation & AI

Three questions before you adopt anything

The cost of a new tool is almost never the price. It is the attention it takes from you every week afterwards.

There is a failure mode that looks like progress: a steady accumulation of tools, each individually sensible, that together consume more attention than the work they were meant to relieve. It is common in exactly the businesses that are trying hardest to modernise.

One: does it solve something you are feeling this week?

Not something that might be useful later. A problem with a name, that cost you time in the last seven days. If you cannot point at the pain, what you have is curiosity, and curiosity is a fine reason to read about something and a poor reason to install it.

Two: how will you know in thirty days whether it worked?

Decide the measure before you start, because afterwards you will rationalise. Hours back, first-reply time, errors avoided, quotes produced. If you cannot name what you are going to look at, you will end up assessing it on how it felt, and new things always feel good for a month.

Three: who maintains it?

This is the question that catches the most candidates. If the honest answer is “me”, then the tool has not removed work — it has changed the shape of it and added a dependency on the one person the business can least afford to occupy.

And write down the rejections

When something fails these questions, note it and why, in one line. Otherwise the same tool comes round again in six months looking new, and you spend another afternoon evaluating a decision you already made.