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So on Monday, I asked you a question. Are you leading your business or are you just occupying space? And I told you something that I really want you to think about. Being needed does not make you valuable. Knowing how to do the right job doesn't entitle you to keep the opportunity. And today, I want to take this conversation a step further. Because AI is changing, the game is moving quickly. So let me be clear. I don't believe AI is coming to replace every entrepreneur, every employee, every consultant, or or even every leader. But I do believe that AI is going to expose the placeholders. And who are those placeholders? Those are the people who stopped learning, the businesses that never built systems, the leaders who don't know why they're doing what they're doing, the person who's been doing something the same way for 15 to 20 years simply just because that's how we've always done it. AI is about to make some things very obvious. So let me tell you what I believe. AI can enhance your greatness, but it can also expose your weakness. And the difference between that is that it starts with whether you actually know what you're doing before you hand it over to AI. So before you build an agent, before you automate your business, before you buy another AI tool, before you even tell Chat GPT to create your entire business strategy, I need you to do a few things first. Are you ready? You're gonna need your pens and your paper for this one. Trust me. So the first thing is know your why. And that's where we left off on Monday. And we talked about why your business exists? What are you actually trying to serve, what problems you're solving, and what results that you're trying to create. Because if you do not understand this and you don't know what you want, how are you going to tell AI what you need? People are building AI agents right now, and I'm seeing that they don't even know exactly what their business does. They haven't even figured out what it is, the problem that they solve. I see people typing in, find me clients. Create this flyer. Okay, what clients? What is the flyer for? Um, what are you gonna say about that? Find me clients, anybody with money? Because that's how some of y'all are running your businesses, and that's exactly how you end up spending hours talking to people who never ever is gonna buy from you. You have to know your right clients, what problem they have, what makes them a great fit. What do you actually want the AI to accomplish? That's why your why matters. And this is not just for people who are starting a business. If you have been leading teams or you have multiple businesses, you need to make sure that everybody knows what the why is. Your why is going to give AI direction. So here's what I want you to do. On your piece of paper and your pen that you got, I want you to take this first action. Before you create an AI agent, you have to finish three sentences. We exist too. Sentence number two, the people we serve are. And sentence number three, the results that we help them achieve is. And if you can't answer those three questions clearly, don't automate nothing. Okay. I'm gonna say that again. If you cannot answer these questions, do not automate nothing. You have to get clear first because you can automate the wrong thing, and then you're doing the wrong thing faster, and your results are going to show. The second thing, you need a system. And this one is a big one, and I don't want you to miss this. Because a lot of business that already exists, they don't have great systems or a system at all. AI can help you create a system, but you need enough understanding of your business to know whether the system it creates is gonna actually make sense. Otherwise, you're gonna find yourself typing, create a client intake system for my business. And guess what AI is gonna do? AI is going to give you something that sounds amazing. And guess what you're gonna do? You're gonna go and copy it and paste it, put your logo on it and say that you created it. And then you'll have absolutely no idea whether it's gonna work for your business, and that is the part that becomes dangerous. A system needs some basic things. The basic things that your system needs is a trigger. What is gonna start that process? It's gonna need steps, what happens and in what order does it happen in? It's gonna need an owner who is gonna be responsible for this system. You're gonna need rules, what can and cannot happen, decision points. If this happens, what do we do about it? You're gonna need an outcome. How do we know that we're finished? And then you're gonna need accountability. Who makes sure this thing is actually working? And that is a system. And when you have all of this together, then AI knows what to do for you. So, for example, let's say that you want AI helping with leads. I don't want you to just say follow up with my leads. I don't want you to do that. It's too vague. You need to know where the leads are coming from, how quickly should they receive a response, what information you need, how AI is going to continue the conversation or start the conversation, when a human is going to step in, if if AI is going to hand off that to a human, where the information is going to go, what is going to happen after that, that is what you need. And then if you get to that point, now you know that you're actually building something and that you can stop wasting your time on the wrong clients. And this is where I want you to be. I don't want the business owner spending half of the day copying and pasting information from one place to another. I want you talking to the right prospect, building the relationships, understanding the problem, creating the strategies, closing the deals, doing the work that actually requires your expertise. And then AI, they can carry some of the weight, but you still need to know where you're going. So now we're on to the third thing that you need. Have some humility. Because being a leader doesn't mean that you're always the expert. And this is where a lot of people are going to struggle with AI because they think that they know everything. They've been doing something for 20 years, so they stopped learning, and they and their answer is, I already know that. Okay, but the market changed. Did you see that? Technology changed, your customers changed, the way people buy changed. The things that we, the tools that we use, those changed. So what does that mean? That means that you can be experienced and you can be outdated. And those two things, they can exist at the same time. A leader has to be willing to become the student again. You got to ask questions, you got to experiment, you have to learn. Admit when you don't understand something. And don't pretend that AI knows everything either, because AI can be wrong. It can hallucinate. And that's important for you to remember. AI can misunderstand you. It can competently give you something that makes absolutely no sense for your business. And that's why you still need expertise, you still need judgment in humans. Just think about it like this AI is the accessory, it's the icing on the cake, it's the complement to what you already do. And it's not your entire business identity. So if you're a great strategist like myself, AI can help you research faster. If you're a great salesperson, then AI can help you prepare for the conversation. If you're a great consultant, AI can help you organize information. And if you are a great leader, AI can help you remove some of the repetitive work that keeps coming up and keeps you from actually trying to lead. So what am I saying? What I am saying is AI should enhance the greatness that you already possess. It should not manufacture fake expertise. And you see that so much on YouTube, where every single body is an expert, giving out false information because they didn't even do the research to see if it was true. And that's why we have to talk about responsible use. And that's our fourth point. Everybody on your team does not need the same AI access. Leaders, you have to lead because AI in the wrong hands can be a disaster, trust me. You can't tell the whole company, everybody, I want y'all all to start using AI. Using what? For what? With what information? I mean, I mean, under what rules are we supposed to do this? Who's gonna check this? How do I know what I'm doing? You need to discuss what they can put in and what they can't. Financial information, client information, confidential company uh company information. You got to have boundaries. And you need to identify who is actually ready to use these tools. Because not everybody is ready. And there's gonna be a huge difference between somebody who knows their CRAD and they use AI to enhance their work, and then the person who's copying and pasting everything. Any person that is an expert can look at an AI response and be like, uh-uh, they did, they use AI. Nope, this is wrong. The copy and paste person, they can't identify that. That's why you need to make sure that if you're going to use AI or someone on your team is going to use AI, they have to be using it for their expertise. Does that make sense? If a person is just copying and pasting everything, they don't even know if something is wrong. And that is a risk. So here's something that I want you to do this week. I want you to look at your team and identify three levels. You got the AI approved level. These are the people that understand the work, they understand the boundaries, and they can verify the output. You have the AI with review level. Now, these people, they can use it, but a qualified person has to review certain parts of their work. And then you have the humans only level. Now, this level, these are decisions, information, or processes that AI should not be handling. That's leadership. You're not running from technology, you're not blindly throwing technology at everything either. You are deciding where it belongs. And finally, our next point is you have to use AI to get back to your real job. What am I saying when I say this? This is the part I really want entrepreneurs to understand. I really want leaders and business owners, I want you to understand the goal isn't to automate everything so you don't have to do nothing. The goal is to automate and streamline the things that is keeping you from doing what you do best. So if you are the CEO and you need some uh AI to automate your calendar so you can stay on track so that you can be able to go out and get more money for the business, that's what you need to be using it for. So when you're looking at your week, I want you to think about these things. Think about how much time you spend. How much time do you spend writing emails, following up, scheduling, making phone calls, looking for information? How much time are you organizing things? How many times and how much time are you creating the same documents over and over again? If you are manually qualifying people, those are the places that I want you looking for. And those are the places where AI will be more of an opportunity. Because if AI can give you five hours back, what are you doing with those five hours? That's the question. If AI handles your follow-up and you're using the extra time just to scroll on Facebook and Instagram and all the social media pages, then you just waste the time. You haven't accomplished nothing. What you have to do is think about how are you going to free up this time and how are you going to use the time that you freed up by using AI. So you want to use that time to find the right client. Talk to the client, strengthen your relationship, networking, improving your services or developing your team, making strategic decisions. You want to use the time wisely. Do the work that actually requires you to be present. Because AI doesn't need to become you. All it needs to do is help remove the things that you have to keep doing repetitively. So I have a challenge for you. Before you automate anything, before you turn on YouTube and start looking at other people's videos with these new AI programs for you to subscribe to, I want you to answer these questions. Why are we doing this? Why is your company doing it? Why do you want to use AI? What does your current system look like? And what part of AI, and what part should AI actually handle? That's AI readiness. That's when you know that you are ready to use AI. That doesn't mean that you're going to download 50 tools or have the most fanciest agents or whatever the case may be. You need clarity, you need systems, humility, responsibility, and what did I say at the beginning of this season? Execution. Because AI can enhance your greatness, remember, but it can definitely expose your weakness. And if you already are good at what you do, keep your toes ten toes down. I don't know if I said that right. Keep your 10 toes down. That don't even make sense. Okay, forget that part. Your experience matters. Your judgment matters. Your relationships matter. Making more money matters. Your ability to look up something and know that that doesn't make sense, that's definitely going to matter when you're using AI because AI is just an accessory. It's not your identity. So don't become a placeholder trying to prove that nobody can replace you. Become that better leader, build that system, teach people, learn the technology, put boundaries around it. Let AI handle what AI can handle. And then take that time back. Go do the work that you should be doing. And the number one and most important thing, and I might have to make an episode about this, is stay in your lane when you're using AI. Make sure that you're using it for your expertise and what you know. If you are a coder and you build websites, don't try to use AI to go out and build an event planning business. If that's not your specialty. If you're a manager and you manage people and then you try to go out and design flyers, it's not your specialty. You're not even going to know what is wrong, what's too much. So stay in your lane. Because the future, it's not about proving how much your business needs you. It's not about, it's about becoming clear, skilled, disciplined, and knowing exactly where your value belongs. That's how you connect the dots between who you are and how you move. So to sum this all up, what I want you to do is just pick a process in your business, write down how it works, identify the piece of AI, identify the place where AI can actually help you improve, automate, or remove. Take your time back and put it towards getting in front of the right client. No more busy work, revenue producing, relationship building, vision moving work. Okay? That is the assignment. And if you know another business owner who is downloading all kinds of AI tools, they everything that they see, but they still don't have a system, send them this episode because they're gonna need it. Like it, share it, and tell me in the comments what is the one thing that you are ready to stop doing manually so that you can get back to actually leading your business. I want to hear from you. Until next time, I'll see you in the next episode.