AI gave me my time back. Now what?
I caught myself the other day fine-tuning my accounting agent. It is the one that collects my receipts, credit card statements, and so on, organizes them for my accountant and me, and gives me back several hours every month. And not just any hours, but the ones that used to be the most frustrating part of my business.
I was working to make the agent a bit better. Or that was the story I had told myself. In reality, there was nothing wrong with that agent. It was functioning properly. It was not perfect, but it was not broken either.
So AI had just given me back several hours, and what did I end up doing with that time? Spending it on something that was neither important nor urgent. If I am totally honest with myself, it was a hobby disguised as work.
If you are at all like me, you might find this situation familiar. When you get the time back, you may not use it to tinker with AI like me, but spend it on some other part of your work that is easy and fairly comfortable. Or maybe even urgent. I am talking about those must-do managerial or admin tasks that have to get done anyway and often have a deadline.
I can immediately point to two or three work items in my business that may not be urgent, and may not even have a deadline, but are certainly more important than the admin tasks I end up doing. I mean the ones that I know are actually going to make a difference to my business in the longer term.
Like actually reaching out to those new potential customers and partners (with a high chance of getting ignored), or having that difficult performance discussion with an employee.
Removing excuses
Obviously, this applies to anything that suddenly makes you more productive in daily managerial and admin work and gives you some time back. At the moment, for many of us, that thing is AI, assuming you have realized its value and committed to learning the basics.
But AI does not automatically change my habits when it comes to prioritizing my time and where I choose to put my mental capacity. If I have a tendency to procrastinate on hard tasks, by default AI just creates more opportunities to do so.
For me, the realization has been that earlier it was easier to find an excuse for pushing something important out. There was always enough busy work with deadlines to make me feel good about my daily choices.
Today it is less so. Agentic workflows and automations have taken over such a big part of the admin work that I am running out of excuses for putting off the important (and hard) stuff.
The AI-powered leader
At this point, I have to tell you about a phenomenon I have come across lately. It is the leader who has recently found AI, and AI has quickly become a central element of everything the leader talks about.
Please do not get me wrong: the main part of my work is pushing leaders to adopt AI in their work. But here I am talking about cases where AI gets in the way of authentic leadership, human connection, and business priorities.
If I were still working in a corporate environment, it would not be very difficult to imagine being one of these characters.
Not everyone is equally excited about AI. I think people are generally positive about seeing their leader apply new technologies and become better at their job, which essentially is leading people. What they may not appreciate is humans disappearing behind a wall of faceless communication, AI talk, and technical gimmicks.
At the end of the day, this is a matter of a leader’s self-awareness, and sometimes coaching helps.
But it is also about the nuances in how leaders and managers are trained and supported to manage the change AI brings to their organizations, themselves included.
I feel inspired every time I see a leader who has figured this out. By being open to learning and change, they use AI to get managerial tasks done faster and to help with prioritization, which lets them spend more time on things that matter, like talking with their team and customers.
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