Stop automating for efficiency. Automate for joy

What does the AI discussion leave out?

When we talk about AI, the majority of the discussion is about two things. On one side, all the technical brilliancy and the amazing things you can do. On the other side, the efficiency, the monetary gains and all the business stuff. And maybe there's a little part of enablement.

One thing that I see that is undervalued in this whole discussion is joy.

Which work should you automate first?

If you look at a business, it consists of multiple parts. That goes for the CEO as much as for an employee doing everyday work. There are things you really like about your job. There are things that are okay. And there are things you really hate about your job, but that are kind of necessary.

For me, for quite some time, the annoying but necessary stuff was accounting and bookkeeping. For some time it was sales. It is not anymore, but it was for quite some time. Or organizing files and data management.

The interesting part is what we can do with AI here: automate the things we do not like. Things we despise, things we hate, things that are necessary but don't bring us joy.

Why do we do better work when we like it?

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor collects a lot of research on this. Things we like to do, we tend to do way better. Things we don't like to do, we can often still do, but the quality is meh, because it's forced. It doesn't come from a happy place, and the energy shows in the work.

What can AI take off your plate in sales and accounting?

AI lets us automate, or at least semi-automate, a lot of the things we don't like, or structure them in a way that makes them easy. In sales: knowing whom to talk to, and having a list of people you want to contact anyway, without having to keep track of who you want to talk to and who you don't. In accounting: having all the dates and what you need to do, and all your files organized in one place. Then you just have to check the numbers.

You automate a lot of the stuff you don't like. And the rest that stays there is joy.

Why does joy pay off for a business?

Joy improves quality. For employees it improves retention, and people stay on a task longer. It also improves efficiency a lot: if you like to do something, you need fewer breaks, you're happier to do it, the result is better and you tend to talk about it more.

So I heavily advise automating for joy. We don't consider this enough: really thinking about which things in our business are important, but we don't like them. That either leads to doing them, but not really well. Or doing them, and it costs a lot of energy.

Why is energy part of the cost?

If something costs you a lot of energy, you can't do it for as long as you want to, and you don't have the energy for other things. Energy is a resource, just like time and money. It costs more energy and focus to do things you don't like.

What also often happens: you just don't do them. They're important, but maybe not that important, or you argue why they're not as important as they actually are. In IT, writing documentation for your software is the prime example. No one wants to do it. So it doesn't get done, or only in a minimal way when someone demands it. It's never up to date, the quality isn't really there, and neither is the understanding.

How do you find what to automate in your business?

This is also a good radar for where you can actually automate. Look at the things you have to do on a regular basis. Look at which of these you don't want to do. Then think about how you could automate them.

Is there a way AI can take over 70, 80, 90 percent, maybe even 100? That is rarely the case. There's almost always a need for a human in the loop.

What is the second half of the ROI question?

The first half is what it costs you in time and money, and maybe in energy. The second half is what it would bring. How would your day-to-day life look if certain things didn't have to be done?

Take an office without any paperwork. Everything is digitalized, and every time you need a document, you just say: give me the document that is somehow named like this, or it's about that topic. And it's found automatically. I did this with a lot of my own stuff. You automate the document sorting, scan 100 or 200 pages, and they get filed, sorted and indexed, so you have everything at hand. Finding paper documents is something you don't have to do anymore. The same goes for the context of what you talked about with someone, because everything is organized and the data is maintained properly.

So next to automating for time, efficiency, money and quality, I think optimizing for joy is one of the great opportunities of AI. Close the gaps where you lose energy on things you don't like about your job, and automate them. Especially if your work has become heavy, getting rid of the things that drain your energy can make you fall in love with the great parts of your job or your business again.