Two executives we met with over the last month talked about AI and their employees, but neither one was referring to layoffs.

“AI solves the brain-numbing work where people you hire want to quit in like a week after doing it. You free them up to do other things and people like their jobs more.”

- President, Financial Services Company

“Up until 6 or 8 months ago, [the analyst role] was all manual data input from PDFs and everyone hated their job and, you know, they’d ask why’d they even go to college?...We faced lots of attrition.”

- Founder & CEO, Property Management Business

AI has earned the reputation as the mother of all job killers. It’s partially true; several corporations have come under fire for automating away thousands of jobs. However, most of these headlines focus on large, tech-focused companies like Oracle, Meta, and Amazon.

Few people seem to grasp the type of work that’s getting removed. Based on the work we’ve done, it’s often the tasks that nobody wanted to do in the first place. This includes manually typing numbers from PDF to Excel, doing the same copy/paste function for two hours on repeat, or doing a fifth QC check to confirm footnotes.

The functions getting targeted hurt both sides of the organization. Owners end up paying a highly skilled salary worker for tasks they could hand an intern. Meanwhile the employees end up feeling overqualified and not impactful.

The first operator listed above had a team of ten manually reviewing hundreds of client legal documents that came in a different form for each state. Nobody volunteered to take on that work, but someone was going to have to do it until an automated solution materialized.

Same thing for the property management business. Employees fresh out of college would last less than a year before leaving to find more fulfilling work that wasn’t raw data entry. Grunt work not only wastes time but also just makes the real work worse.

There’s a reason we ask our clients, “what’s the dumbest way employees spend their time?” as we mentioned in Reporting for Duty. When we’re hunting for the first project, it usually gets unearthed through these few questions:

1. What’s the most boring part of your job?

2. What manual work wastes the most time?

3. Which recurring tasks would you like an intern to take from you?

It all focuses on where the business gets the least out of its best people. Rarely is it a question of, “how many employees can we get rid of?”

So there’s the next step for operators looking to support teams who might be worried that AI is coming for their job:

• Ask each of your direct reports the same question this week. “If we were to hire an intern for next month, what work should we hand them to better allocate your time?” Write down each task and then get them to estimate the hours it would save them.

How you ask likely decides what you hear. If it’s “what can get cut?”, then you might be met with silence. Ask what they’d give an intern and then focus the conversation on how to ensure they have time to focus on what matters.