Show Notes
Business owners are wasting massive amounts of time building AI agents when they should be figuring out what their business actually needs.
Scott isn't anti-agent—he has them in his business. But there's an untold tax: onboarding, maintenance, troubleshooting. In small businesses, guess who does it? You.
The Easter Weekend story: Anthropic changed their terms. 3pm Saturday, Scott's OpenClaw stopped working. He spent Easter weekend switching to ChatGPT. His wife was not happy.
The hidden burden: Every new OpenClaw release broke what he'd already fixed. Nights and weekends troubleshooting. Time spent with AI agents is time not spent with the team.
Digital dust: The AI is producing outputs Scott doesn't have time to review. It's not being used. It's digital dust.
The new default: When work needs to come off Scott's plate, the desire is to give it to AI. But his default now is to give it to a human. A VA can be onboarded in 48 hours. An AI agent might take 100+ hours of teaching, testing, and overseeing.
Humans first: Humans allow you to pressure test processes. They know if something's working. They can find a better way. If a process doesn't work with humans, it won't work with AI agents. You're just automating chaos—and chaos amplifies.
The broken speaker: Turn up the volume on a broken speaker and the distortion gets louder. Apply AI to broken processes and the chaos happens faster.
The close: If you've been putting off the AI agent thing because something feels off—trust that instinct.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
Business owners, we are wasting massive amounts of time building AI agents when what we need to be doing is figuring out what our business really needs. I'm not anti-agent, and I'm not telling you not to deploy them. And I have them in my business, but there's an untold tax that business leaders are having to pay to deploy these AI agents. And in fact,
I've spent countless hours not only onboarding my AI agent, who I introduced in the previous episode, but I now have to maintain another system. So it's the onboarding and now it's the maintenance. And in small businesses, guess who does it? You do. And what I've discovered is that the task that I have it doing, while they're valuable.
And they save some time. There's also a lot of work that's being produced into new AI artifacts, and it's not being used. You know what it's turning into? Digital dust. So what am I doing instead? I'm gonna tell you. But but first, I'm Scott Todd. I've built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my corporate VP job. And this channel is dedicated to helping you build a business that you love.
And here's what I'm doing. I'm choosing to invest in my team to learn how to be more productive with AI. AI agents are exciting because it sounds like we don't have to have humans around and we can just have these machines that are working 247, and that might be exciting to some people. I can tell you to your employees and to your team, it's not exciting. To to business leaders, it sounds like, ⁓ man, it sounds great.
But to your employees, not so much. And see, while it's true that we could have these things doing this, ultimately what's happening is that we're spending more and more time maintaining the system. So let me give you an example. And I've I can I have countless examples I could give you, but let me give you just a let me give you this one. We'll see if I give you another one. Here it is. I spent months building my open claw. I'm telling you.
Months. And it was running. It was, I was enjoying it. It was giving me things. And I gotta admit, it was giving me things that I wasn't using. It's producing stuff. And I'm like, I don't have time to go through what it's producing anymore. It wasn't, it was digital dust. And then on Good Friday, what happened was Anthropic announced that they were going to change our abilities to use our subscriptions with our open claw.
And as a result, on 3 p.m. on the Saturday before Easter, your thing was gonna stop working. Well, guess what I ended up spending my Easter weekend doing? Trying to figure out how to change over my system to the Chat GPT model. And it wasn't as simple as like, well, let's just plug in this new model because the Chat GPT model at the time was not as good as Claude.
So all of a sudden, the stuff that had been working for months and I had invested hours in just magically stopped working. And it left me scrambling. And in fact, it left me scrambling over Easter weekend. And needless to say, my wife was not too happy that I'm sitting there trying to maintain some AI system over a holiday weekend. And you see, that's the thing, is that software that
Powers the AI agents, they also have issues. It's not just the models, it's the framework behind the software that powers the agent. And let me give an example. OpenClaw went through a series of bad deployments where every new release caused the system to break. And that meant I was spending time, nights, weekends, again troubleshooting my agent. Okay. Like
In a small business, that's you. That's me. And like I have some technical people, I have a lot of technical people that work with me. And they're not using this, they're not using the agents. And every new upgrade that came out that I was thinking, well, this is gonna be the solution. Guess what? It broke what I had already fixed. And that is time that I spent on.
Arlo. It's an undocumented burden that we're not talking about. It's just like with an employee. You have to onboard your employees. I have to onboard mine. That takes time. I had to onboard my agent. Every new task, I have to take the time to do that. And it's time that I'm it's time that I'm spending with the AI agent, and it means I'm not spending it with my employees.
When I'm investing that time into the AI agent, I'm not investing it in my team. And I believe that at this stage, you're going to get better results by spending time with your team and in helping them to understand how to use AI to make their jobs more productive. And that's where I am at this crossroad is that look, whenever I need to get work off my plate,
The desire is to turn it over to AI. But my default now is to give it to a human. I want to give it to the human because I can have a human doing a task. Even if I have to onboard a VA in 48 hours, I can get them on my team within an instant. I can just basically give them that task and that frees me up. It gives me more time. Now, on the other hand, I could spend
I don't know, a hundred hours to onboard the AI agent on that particular task. And you're you might say, well, that doesn't take a hundred hours. Well, you see, it's not just the teaching or the documenting, it's about watching and testing and overseeing it. It's about not knowing if the process is really automatable yet.
And so it does take time, maybe not a hundred hours, but it does take time. And look, you might say, hey, Scott, wait a minute, you're gonna invest the time in teaching an AI agent, or you're gonna take the time and invest it in the human, why not use the AI agent? And I agree that look, you there is a trade-off here. But if you haven't built a solid system yet, we've spent weeks talking about all of the traps and building with scale. If you haven't built a solid process yet.
Well, then humans do something that technology can. The humans allow you to pressure test processes. The humans know if something's working. The humans can determine if there's a better way of doing something. And if your process doesn't work with humans today, it's definitely not going to work with AI agents. Because before we try to automate something, we have to make sure that it works the best with humans.
And if it doesn't, then you're ultimately trying to automate chaos. And when you automate chaos, what happens is that chaos gets amplified. Whatever, whatever was broken is going to break faster. And the example that I always use is think about a broken speaker. When you have a broken speaker and you turn up the volume, it the distortion is just louder. It breaks louder.
It's the same way with AI and automation. When we apply AI to our broken processes, the chaos just happens faster. So I believe in the human first approach. Let's get the humans to clean up the processes. Let's get them streamlined. Let's make sure that we're looking for ways that we can automate the process after we know that it works.
And then what I want is I want to use the automation and the AI not to augment my team, but I want to make my team more productive. Instead of my team spending hours researching something for me, can the AI agent do that research and give it to a human who's able to say, yeah, this works. The human approves or declines it. It's working in sync with the AI, not replacing the human.
Because that's going to drive more productivity for my entire team. And it's not as I don't know, exciting as having a completely autonomous company. But I don't think we've seen that yet. It just means that the that the leader is working more hours. So if you've been putting off this AI agent thing because something feels off, I'm going to encourage you to trust that instinct. And I will see you in our next episode.
Business owners, we are wasting massive amounts of time building AI agents when what we need to be doing is figuring out what our business really needs. I'm not anti-agent, and I'm not telling you not to deploy them. And I have them in my business, but there's an untold tax that business leaders are having to pay to deploy these AI agents. And in fact,
I've spent countless hours not only onboarding my AI agent, who I introduced in the previous episode, but I now have to maintain another system. So it's the onboarding and now it's the maintenance. And in small businesses, guess who does it? You do. And what I've discovered is that the task that I have it doing, while they're valuable.
And they save some time. There's also a lot of work that's being produced into new AI artifacts, and it's not being used. You know what it's turning into? Digital dust. So what am I doing instead? I'm gonna tell you. But but first, I'm Scott Todd. I've built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my corporate VP job. And this channel is dedicated to helping you build a business that you love.
And here's what I'm doing. I'm choosing to invest in my team to learn how to be more productive with AI. AI agents are exciting because it sounds like we don't have to have humans around and we can just have these machines that are working 247, and that might be exciting to some people. I can tell you to your employees and to your team, it's not exciting. To to business leaders, it sounds like, ⁓ man, it sounds great.
But to your employees, not so much. And see, while it's true that we could have these things doing this, ultimately what's happening is that we're spending more and more time maintaining the system. So let me give you an example. And I've I can I have countless examples I could give you, but let me give you just a let me give you this one. We'll see if I give you another one. Here it is. I spent months building my open claw. I'm telling you.
Months. And it was running. It was, I was enjoying it. It was giving me things. And I gotta admit, it was giving me things that I wasn't using. It's producing stuff. And I'm like, I don't have time to go through what it's producing anymore. It wasn't, it was digital dust. And then on Good Friday, what happened was Anthropic announced that they were going to change our abilities to use our subscriptions with our open claw.
And as a result, on 3 p.m. on the Saturday before Easter, your thing was gonna stop working. Well, guess what I ended up spending my Easter weekend doing? Trying to figure out how to change over my system to the Chat GPT model. And it wasn't as simple as like, well, let's just plug in this new model because the Chat GPT model at the time was not as good as Claude.
So all of a sudden, the stuff that had been working for months and I had invested hours in just magically stopped working. And it left me scrambling. And in fact, it left me scrambling over Easter weekend. And needless to say, my wife was not too happy that I'm sitting there trying to maintain some AI system over a holiday weekend. And you see, that's the thing, is that software that
Powers the AI agents, they also have issues. It's not just the models, it's the framework behind the software that powers the agent. And let me give an example. OpenClaw went through a series of bad deployments where every new release caused the system to break. And that meant I was spending time, nights, weekends, again troubleshooting my agent. Okay. Like
In a small business, that's you. That's me. And like I have some technical people, I have a lot of technical people that work with me. And they're not using this, they're not using the agents. And every new upgrade that came out that I was thinking, well, this is gonna be the solution. Guess what? It broke what I had already fixed. And that is time that I spent on.
Arlo. It's an undocumented burden that we're not talking about. It's just like with an employee. You have to onboard your employees. I have to onboard mine. That takes time. I had to onboard my agent. Every new task, I have to take the time to do that. And it's time that I'm it's time that I'm spending with the AI agent, and it means I'm not spending it with my employees.
When I'm investing that time into the AI agent, I'm not investing it in my team. And I believe that at this stage, you're going to get better results by spending time with your team and in helping them to understand how to use AI to make their jobs more productive. And that's where I am at this crossroad is that look, whenever I need to get work off my plate,
The desire is to turn it over to AI. But my default now is to give it to a human. I want to give it to the human because I can have a human doing a task. Even if I have to onboard a VA in 48 hours, I can get them on my team within an instant. I can just basically give them that task and that frees me up. It gives me more time. Now, on the other hand, I could spend
I don't know, a hundred hours to onboard the AI agent on that particular task. And you're you might say, well, that doesn't take a hundred hours. Well, you see, it's not just the teaching or the documenting, it's about watching and testing and overseeing it. It's about not knowing if the process is really automatable yet.
And so it does take time, maybe not a hundred hours, but it does take time. And look, you might say, hey, Scott, wait a minute, you're gonna invest the time in teaching an AI agent, or you're gonna take the time and invest it in the human, why not use the AI agent? And I agree that look, you there is a trade-off here. But if you haven't built a solid system yet, we've spent weeks talking about all of the traps and building with scale. If you haven't built a solid process yet.
Well, then humans do something that technology can. The humans allow you to pressure test processes. The humans know if something's working. The humans can determine if there's a better way of doing something. And if your process doesn't work with humans today, it's definitely not going to work with AI agents. Because before we try to automate something, we have to make sure that it works the best with humans.
And if it doesn't, then you're ultimately trying to automate chaos. And when you automate chaos, what happens is that chaos gets amplified. Whatever, whatever was broken is going to break faster. And the example that I always use is think about a broken speaker. When you have a broken speaker and you turn up the volume, it the distortion is just louder. It breaks louder.
It's the same way with AI and automation. When we apply AI to our broken processes, the chaos just happens faster. So I believe in the human first approach. Let's get the humans to clean up the processes. Let's get them streamlined. Let's make sure that we're looking for ways that we can automate the process after we know that it works.
And then what I want is I want to use the automation and the AI not to augment my team, but I want to make my team more productive. Instead of my team spending hours researching something for me, can the AI agent do that research and give it to a human who's able to say, yeah, this works. The human approves or declines it. It's working in sync with the AI, not replacing the human.
Because that's going to drive more productivity for my entire team. And it's not as I don't know, exciting as having a completely autonomous company. But I don't think we've seen that yet. It just means that the that the leader is working more hours. So if you've been putting off this AI agent thing because something feels off, I'm going to encourage you to trust that instinct. And I will see you in our next episode.