AI · · 5 min read
The 5 traits that businesses getting ahead of AI have in common
As we’ve been building The Idea Experience, we’ve been asking business owners a simple question: “What part of your business is harder than it should be?”
Written by the team at The Idea Experience
Some owners had an answer immediately: an accounting process, creating proposals, or manually re-entering data from one system to another.
Others didn’t, which surprised us. Most businesses have at least one thing running on more effort than it needs to, or a project that has been sitting on the back burner. The owners with a ready answer also tended to be the ones already curious about using AI to fix it. To us, that’s not a coincidence.
We’ve worked with enough of these owners to see what else they have in common, beyond being able to name their own bottleneck. A few traits keep showing up.
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They’re restless even when things are working.
They keep asking where the business could deliver more for less, or where they’re still personally stuck approving something that shouldn’t need their input every time.
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They’ve usually already built something themselves.
It might be a spreadsheet or a script. In one case, an owner built a full AI solution, but it was still a local version reliant on his knowledge and availability to run it. That instinct to actually fix the problem is most of what we look for. Our own work often starts exactly here, taking something that began as a band-aid but never became a stable, scalable solution.
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They expect to adjust a new system after it launches.
A lot of AI initiatives fail because a business expects the first rollout to be perfect. The businesses that get real value ship something imperfect and keep improving it.
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They notice when a process depends on one person.
And that’s what they want to fix next. It isn’t because they don’t trust that person. Often, it’s the owner themselves. Depending on any one person forever isn’t a plan.
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They invest in employees who help eliminate their own rote work.
They notice the people automating Accounts Payable matching, data re-entry, and the formulaic work nobody is attached to, then using the extra time for something that actually challenges them, even if that work sits outside their job description.
Small businesses already run on people wearing a lot of hats. The employees comfortable with that tend to do well as more of the repetitive part of a role gets automated, and they’re worth compensating for it.
None of this requires a business to be large, funded, or already sophisticated.
The traits above are about attitude. AI has simply raised the bar for what businesses should accept as normal when it comes to manual or repetitive processes.
Written by the team at The Idea Experience, who spend most of our time working alongside exactly these kinds of people.