Stop Buying AI Tools. Fix Your Process First.

A client showed me his subscription list last month. Fourteen grand a year in AI tools. A CRM nobody fully set up. Two project management platforms competing for the same job. A chatbot builder. An AI writer. A “smart” scheduler that scheduled exactly nothing.

Half of it wasn’t being used. None of it talked to each other. His team was still doing the same manual work they were doing two years ago, just with more browser tabs open.

I’ve been there. I started podcasting in 2008 and I have personally bought, tried, and abandoned more “this will change everything” tools than I want to admit. Hosting platforms, transcription services, scheduling tools, AI editors, three different DAWs. Most of them solved a problem I didn’t actually have.

The 70/30 Rule

Here is what I keep seeing in small and mid-sized organizations across Indiana: 70% of a successful AI implementation is people and process. Maybe 30% is the tool.

That isn’t a slogan. It’s the pattern.

When you bolt a tool onto a broken process, the tool works perfectly. The process is still broken. You just added a monthly bill on top of it.

The Paper Test

Before you buy anything, try this. Could you run this process on paper?

If you can’t explain the steps, the handoffs, and the decision points on a whiteboard, no software is going to save you. The tool will inherit your confusion and run faster with it.

This is the first thing I look at in every assessment. Not your tech stack. What your team actually does on a Tuesday.

What Fixing the Process Looks Like

It isn’t a six-month rebuild. It’s four steps.

1. Watch what your team actually does. Not what the SOP says. What they actually do. Sit with them.
2. Find the friction. Where things stall, where people wait, where the same data gets typed twice.
3. Cut before you automate. Eliminating a step beats automating it.
4. Then go buy the tool. Now you know what you need, and you stop guessing.

A Real One

A manufacturing client was running customer orders through three spreadsheets, two email threads, and a dry-erase board in the office. They wanted a $500-a-month ERP.

I asked to see the order flow. We mapped it. Twenty-three steps. Nine of them were the same person retyping the same information into the next spreadsheet. Four were “go check if Karen updated her file yet.”

We didn’t sell them the ERP. They already had a tool that could do most of it. We turned it on properly, killed the duplicate steps, and built three small automations for the data entry that was left.

Twelve hours back every week. A fraction of what the ERP would have cost.

The ERP would have happily automated all twenty-three steps. We deleted thirteen and automated four. Less software, better result. That is what our implementation work is built around.

The Takeaway

AI is a multiplier. It multiplies whatever you point it at.

Point it at a clean process and you get efficiency. Point it at chaos and you get faster chaos.

Fix the process. Then buy the tool. If you want a second set of eyes on which is which, let’s talk.