Essay 02

Balancing efficiency and loyalty to your people

You can see the savings AI might bring, and you can see the faces of the people whose work it touches. Both feel like your responsibility, because they are.

Every owner who gets serious about AI reaches the same question. If this works, what happens to the people who used to do that work?

There are two easy answers, and both are wrong. One says efficiency is the whole point, so take the savings as headcount. The other says nobody's job will change, which means the tool sits on top of the old work and nothing gets better. The useful answer is a balance, and it can be planned before the first process changes rather than argued about afterward.

Decide what AI takes and what people keep

Go through the process step by step with the person who owns it and sort the steps into two lists.

AI usually fits the steps that are repetitive, follow rules, and get checked by someone anyway: pulling information out of documents, first drafts, summaries, sorting incoming requests, rebuilding the same report every week.

People should keep the steps that carry judgment, relationships, and accountability: deciding on exceptions, handling an unhappy customer, knowing which supplier will come through on short notice, signing off on the result. Those also tend to be the parts of the job people like.

Write the split down and show it to the team. When people can see that the tool takes the retyping and they keep the judgment, the conversation changes.

Decide where the savings go before you have them

Time freed by AI goes somewhere. If you do not decide where, it either disappears into slack or turns into a cut nobody planned. Before the trial starts, choose. There are a few honest options.

Room to grow. The same team handles more work as the company grows, so you add fewer people next year instead of letting people go this year. For a growing company this is often the best use.

Moving people to work that has been waiting. Every company has a backlog of things nobody had time for: checking in with customers before something goes wrong, documenting how things actually get done, training new people properly, the projects that keep getting pushed.

Attrition. When someone leaves or retires, ask whether the role needs to be refilled exactly as it was. Over time the team changes shape without anyone being pushed out.

Better work. Sometimes the right answer is to keep the hours and spend them doing the work more carefully.

None of these are soft options. Each one captures the value. They just do not treat headcount as the only place savings can come from.

When a role honestly has to change

Sometimes a role is mostly made of the steps the tool now handles. Pretending otherwise is not kind. It leaves a person in a job everyone can see is shrinking.

Handle it the way you would want it handled for you:

• Tell the person early and directly, before rumors do it for you.
• Explain what is changing and why, in terms of the work, not the technology.
• Offer the new version of the role first, with real training and real time to learn it.
• If there is no fit, be honest and generous about it, and help with what comes next.

Everyone watches how the first one goes. Handle it well and the next process gets easier, because the team believes you.

Questions to ask yourself before any cut

1. Have I decided what the freed time could be used for, or am I only looking at the cost line?
2. Is this person's knowledge of how things really work written down anywhere? If not, what leaves with them?
3. If we grow the way we plan, would we need this role again within a year?
4. Is there an opening coming through attrition that solves this more slowly but better?
5. Did the process really change, or did the work just move to someone else?
6. How will the rest of the team read this, and will they still tell me where things break?

The last question matters most. The people closest to the work are the ones who show you where AI can help. If they learn that helping means losing their job, they stop showing you.

On Monday

For the process you picked, write two short lists: what the tool takes and what people keep. Then write one sentence on where the freed time will go. Share both with the owner of the process before anything starts.