Most small business owners asking about AI are really asking a staffing question. Neil Thubron, an executive coach and sales trainer who once led 450 salespeople, gets asked it by owners under financial pressure who think they might have to cut people. His answer on Unscripted Small Business was to start with the work, not the headcount.
“where can AI replace what some of your team are doing today so that the ones that you want to can focus on the higher value tasks.”
That framing changes the project. You aren’t buying an AI tool. You’re deciding which hours in your business are worth a person.
Start with the tasks nobody should be doing by hand
Neil’s list of what AI can already take is the back office: sending and chasing invoices, paying them, social media scheduling, sending proposals. His rough test was anything you would otherwise give an executive assistant or an accounts team. He also named why it appeals to owners. Hiring and managing people is one of the hardest parts of running a business, and an AI agent doesn’t have bad days or sick days.
Before you automate any of it, write the process down. Bradley Benner’s warning applies here: you cannot automate a process you have never written down, and automating a sloppy one compounds the problem.
A simple way to start this week:
- List every recurring task your team does in a week, with who does it and how long it takes.
- Mark the ones that follow the same steps every time. Those are the candidates.
- Mark the ones that involve a customer conversation. Those stay human.
- Write down what each person would do with the hours you free up. If the answer is “nothing new,” you have a cost question, not an AI question.
The work AI can’t see
Neil’s case for people rests on how communication works. He uses the 7, 38 and 55 percent split, words versus tone versus body language, and says AI only reaches the words. That split comes from Albert Mehrabian’s research on how people read feelings and attitudes, so treat it as a direction rather than a law for every conversation. The direction holds up in sales, though. A buyer leaning back, a pause before a price, a question that didn’t get asked. Coaches, Neil said, are trained to look for what’s not being said.
“What AI does is it creates an opportunity for you to spend your time out doing only what only you can do, which is the human contact, the human piece.”
He aims this squarely at salespeople who spend the day on admin and the CRM instead of in front of customers. The automation is only worth it if the freed time goes back into customer conversations.
Where this breaks in practice
We see the same failure across marketing: a business automates the follow-up and then nobody owns the conversation the follow-up was supposed to start. Matt Tyner described the version of this that happens between marketing and operations in the promise breaking three steps after the lead. AI makes that gap faster, not smaller, unless someone is assigned to the human piece.
So for every task you hand to AI, name the person who gets the hour back and the customer work they’ll do with it.
Neil’s full conversation, including his framework for selling on business outcomes, is in the Unscripted Small Business recap. You’ll find more from him on his blog at neilthubron.com.
If you want help deciding which tasks to hand off and which conversations to protect, book an intro meeting with the collaborative.