I recently attended a Chamber of Commerce luncheon with a panel of AI experts. The room was full of the people you’d expect at one of these, sharp, engaged operators, people like Amy Pearlstine and Marty Moriarty, who make these events worth showing up to. But I left that particular luncheon underwhelmed, and it wasn’t because of the company. It was the panel.
The lineup was strong on paper: a CEO of an AI company, a college’s Director of AI Initiatives, and a marketing consultant. Three credible voices, three different lenses on AI. And here’s the part that surprised me: the one who answered the most practical questions with the most clarity wasn’t the CEO or the PhD. It was the marketing consultant. He was the only one who consistently got to the heart of what the room was actually asking.
The other two showed real depth. Genuine expertise, no question. But depth wasn’t the problem. The problem was they couldn’t come back down to earth and explain what any of it meant for a business owner sitting in that room, running payroll, chasing leads, trying to keep the lights on.
As we moved from the salad, to the chicken, to dessert (a Japanese cheesecake, for what it’s worth, delicious), I watched the room’s attention drift the same way. Somewhere around the second overly technical answer, more people were paying attention to their plates than the panel.
Then came the show of hands. When asked how much they actually knew about AI, most answers landed somewhere between amateur and intermediate. When I followed up with a few of them one-on-one after, most were even less confident than their hands suggested.
That’s the real issue. Intellectuals and tech guys, the genuinely smart ones, can get so wrapped up in the complexity of the technology that they lose the ability to say it simply. And simplicity is what 99% of people need before they’ll adopt anything, especially something that already feels as daunting as AI, applied to something as precious as a business someone spent years building. It’s the movie scene where the scientist has the data to save the world, and everyone around him is just asking him to say it in English.
The AI community has to get better at communication, or it’s going to keep running into this same wall of hesitancy from business owners, indefinitely.
That starts with making AI and automation sound practical. Nobody adopts what doesn’t feel useful to them specifically. Right now, most business owners sit on one of two ends of the same spectrum: they either use AI like a slightly smarter search engine, or they’re intimidated enough by what they’ve heard that they don’t touch it at all. And here’s the thing: those two ends actually meet. The spectrum isn’t a line. It’s a circle. Both groups end up in the same place: getting none of the value.
There may come a time when AI does more harm than good. Some would argue that time is already here. But my belief is simple: AI is a tool, and its job is to do one of two things for a business owner: save them time, or help them make more money. Sales, outreach, managing, traffic. That’s it. That’s the whole pitch, when you strip the hype away.
But none of that matters if we can’t communicate how. In the early 1900s, someone had to explain to a horse-and-carriage driver why a car would get him where he needed to go, faster, and why that mattered to his life. Nobody adopted the car because they understood the combustion engine. They adopted it because someone made the outcome make sense.
So since I’m in this seat myself, an automation consultant, here are practical solutions business owners can adopt immediately, without needing a computer science degree to understand why they work:
- Speed to lead. A missed call at 6pm doesn’t just sit there, it goes to the next business on the list. An automated text back within seconds keeps that lead warm until you can actually talk to them. It’s not replacing you. It’s holding the door open until you get there.
- No-show and reschedule follow-up. A missed appointment costs more than the appointment itself; it costs the referrals that would have come from it. An automated reminder sequence, and an automated rebooking offer the moment someone cancels, turns a dead slot back into revenue without anyone having to chase it down.
- Review requests sent at the right moment. A request sent while the work is still fresh, right after the job’s done, gets answered. A request sent a week later gets ignored. Automating the timing, not just the ask, is the difference between a handful of reviews a year and a steady stream that builds trust before a prospect ever calls.
- Quote and intake automation. Every hour spent rebuilding the same quote from scratch is an hour not spent on the next job. A form that pulls the details straight into a template turns a 30-minute task into a 5-minute one, and it does it the same way every time, whether you’re the one doing it or someone on your team.
My bottom-line philosophy is this: AI and automation should be practical, and they should be explained practically. Automation exists to enable your talent, not replace it. A plumber should be worried about growing his business and turning wrenches, not doing admin work at 5pm in the back of his truck. A realtor should be focused on showing homes, reading a room, and explaining to a client why this house is the right one, not worrying about a missed call because he was mid-showing and couldn’t pick up the phone.
AI shouldn’t be something business owners shy away from. It should be treated as the great equalizer: the thing that lets you go toe-to-toe with the big guys, so your talent and your work are what actually do the talking.
If you’re an operator who’s heard enough hype and just wants to know where automation actually fits in your business, happy to have that conversation with you too.
P.S. The cheesecake was delicious, by the way.