I Think We Underestimate How Work Gets Done
Hi all 👋
I spent a lot of time this week talking with operators about where people actually add the most value inside a workflow. You see it in how the market is talking about AI, and you see it when a business tries to out-hire a broken process.
What's Happening in AI
A lot of the AI conversation is still focused on job replacement. The bigger shift is productivity.
The organizations creating the most value aren't necessarily replacing people. They're redesigning how work gets done and giving their teams the right tools to execute better.
We saw exactly the same thing in a transport project we recently delivered.
This Week's Case Study
One transport client was getting close to hiring an $85,000/year claims analyst just to keep up with a growing volume of insurance claims.
Some claims were taking up to 12 months to resolve. The team spent most of their time following up with insurers, tracking emails, checking claim statuses, and trying to keep everything moving.
As claim volumes increased, hiring another person started to feel like the obvious next step. But once we looked a little closer, it became pretty clear the real bottleneck was coordination.
Instead of adding another person to manage the workload, we redesigned how information moved through the process and automated the coordination layer.
The result wasn't just avoiding the additional hire. Vehicles returned to service significantly faster, the administrative workload dropped, and the team could focus on work that actually required human judgment.
I share a bit more detail on how we approached the workflow here.
A Useful Resource
One question I get quite often is: "How do I know if a process is actually worth automating?"
That's why we built the Administrative Tax Calculator. It shows you how much you're paying premium salaries to do low-value work — chasing updates, manual entry, bridging gaps between systems. Before you hire another person, see how much you're already losing to a broken process.
That's it for this week.
— Robbie
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Hi all 👋
I spent a lot of time this week talking with operators about where people actually add the most value inside a workflow. You see it in how the market is talking about AI, and you see it when a business tries to out-hire a broken process.
What's Happening in AI
A lot of the AI conversation is still focused on job replacement. The bigger shift is productivity.
The organizations creating the most value aren't necessarily replacing people. They're redesigning how work gets done and giving their teams the right tools to execute better.
We saw exactly the same thing in a transport project we recently delivered.
This Week's Case Study
One transport client was getting close to hiring an $85,000/year claims analyst just to keep up with a growing volume of insurance claims.
Some claims were taking up to 12 months to resolve. The team spent most of their time following up with insurers, tracking emails, checking claim statuses, and trying to keep everything moving.
As claim volumes increased, hiring another person started to feel like the obvious next step. But once we looked a little closer, it became pretty clear the real bottleneck was coordination.
Instead of adding another person to manage the workload, we redesigned how information moved through the process and automated the coordination layer.
The result wasn't just avoiding the additional hire. Vehicles returned to service significantly faster, the administrative workload dropped, and the team could focus on work that actually required human judgment.
I share a bit more detail on how we approached the workflow here.
A Useful Resource
One question I get quite often is: "How do I know if a process is actually worth automating?"
That's why we built the Administrative Tax Calculator. It shows you how much you're paying premium salaries to do low-value work — chasing updates, manual entry, bridging gaps between systems. Before you hire another person, see how much you're already losing to a broken process.
That's it for this week.
— Robbie
