You’ve worked with hundreds of businesses to build AI now. And you keep seeing the same story play out, time and time again.
Some of them are reacting in fear. Spending all night vibe coding unsecure, unusable tools that do nothing but build a mountain of technical debt inside their business. Debt they are going to spend the next couple of years untangling.
The rest walk in with a problem. Something in the business is bleeding time, money or margin, and they just want it fixed.
Fair enough. You’d want the same.
But here’s the bit you don’t say out loud often enough. The projects you love bringing to life are the moonshots. And to be honest with you, most of your clients aren’t thinking about building one when they come to you. It’s not on their mind at all.
They’re thinking about AI in a very selfish way. How do I make this one thing stop hurting?
And that’s where most of them stop.
Micro employees without sick days
There are three levels of AI opportunity that exist within a business. Cost savers, money makers and moonshots.
Cost savers are micro employees. They remove repetitive tasks and free up your team to focus on higher leverage work.
Cost savers are micro employees. Same jobs, same customers, same product. Just a little cheaper to run.
Think about the work in a business that happens the same way every single day. Chasing documents. Sending follow-ups. Moving data between systems. Answering the same questions from customers over and over again.
AI handles all of that consistently, instantly, and honestly… without the sick days.
That’s a good hire. Make it.
But it’s still a hire for the business you already have. Same jobs, same customers, same product. Just a little cheaper to run.
Three levels of AI opportunity
Money makers are where you start to play the game at a proper level. You significantly upgrade the experience and the value you provide to your customers, by using AI to do things that are currently unaffordable, unscalable, or just downright unfeasible. Whole new products and services inside the business.
Money makers do what was unaffordable or unscalable before. A micro employee beside every customer, at every step.
No business could ever afford to hire a person to sit beside every single customer at every step. A micro employee can.
Then there are moonshots. These are projects that fundamentally redefine what your business is, not just how it runs. Something your competitors can’t just copy, because it’s built with your intellectual property, your data and your relationships.
That isn’t a hire at all. That’s a new business with your expertise at the centre of it.
So line them up honestly:
- Cost savers: micro employees doing the grind. The business runs cheaper.
- Money makers: AI doing what you could never afford a person to do. The customer gets more.
- Moonshots: a new product built from what only you have. The business becomes something else.
Most people only ever hire the first one.
Why the smallest prize feels like the safe one
If you’re a business owner right now, you are probably dealing with some AI anxiety. You could be feeling that you’re falling behind your fellow entrepreneurs day after day. You’ve got this sense that everyone around you is building better things with AI, doing more with it, and operating at a better level than you are. Maybe you’re finding it exhausting trying to keep up with the never ending stream of model releases and game changing tools that are going to transform your business.
If any of that’s true, I want you to relax.
You don’t need to keep up with every new model release. You don’t need to add in hundreds of new AI tools that just make your business more complex to run. What you need to do is go all in on solving your highest leverage problems with AI.
And when you’re anxious, the cost savers feel like the responsible choice. Small. Contained. A bit better, faster, cheaper. The bigger ideas feel unaffordable, unscalable and unfeasible… so you never even let yourself dream about them.
That’s the smallest prize.
It’s not a bad prize. It’s just the one everyone else in your industry is going for too.
The 25 grand mistake
I can tell you after nearly a decade building systems that have scaled to millions of users, the answer isn’t just to move fast. It’s to be deliberate. It’s to identify the right thing to build and why you need to build it.
Because you don’t want to be the business owner that spends 25 grand on building an AI tool that your customers hate and no one uses.
And that happens more often than you think.
Why?
Because business owners are too close to their own product. They can’t see the innovative ideas that exist all around them. You know your business so well that you only see the jobs inside it, so the only AI you can picture is something to help with those jobs.
That’s how you end up with a micro employee nobody asked for, doing a task nobody minded, in a business that hasn’t changed.
The money makers and the moonshots don’t start with a task. They start with your customer. What would they pay more for? What would they love that nobody in your industry can afford to give them? What do you know, from years of doing this work, that no competitor could copy even if they had the same AI?
That last question is where real AI product development starts. Not with the tool. With what only you have.
So by all means, fix the thing that’s bleeding. Hire the micro employees. Let them chase the documents and answer the same questions over and over again.
Then sit down and do the harder thing. Dream without the limits you’ve been putting on yourself, and write down the version of your business that your competitors couldn’t build.
Stop aiming at the smallest prize.
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