In every aspect of business, startup and even in the military, a team is what makes it go around. Most recently in my downtown office I hired my first administrative assistant who went onto bigger and greener pasture co-founding her own construction company. A year later I went through a few virtual assistants to help with day-to-day new business development, research and clerical tasks. Today, I’m going to visit the last one, spend some time chatting and share lessons learned, best practices, and tips how software and AI is impacting the industry.

All too often entrepreneurs spend most of their time on the operational and tactical elements of the business and barely enough time on strategy. But strategy and planning is key in long term growth and sustainability– especially when there is so much seismic activity affecting business.

Previously, CEOs and chief executives would have several vice presidents/ directors for customer support, marketing, legal and operations:

CEO

  • _ VP, customer support+ human staff
  • _ VP, marketing+ human staff
  • _ VP, legal+ human staff
  • _ VP, operations+ human staff

Each of these director level positions would have dozens if not hundreds of individuals reporting to this senior position and use software such as Slack to communicate with each other. Every department instance requires time and human effort to move the needle and in most cases APIs and bots to expedite communication between each other. Like email but internal.

In the future and where it’s been going:

CEO

  • _ VP, customer support+ AI support agent
  • _ VP, marketing+ AI marketing agent
  • _ VP, legal+ AI legal agent
  • _ VP, operations+ AI operations agent

Companies everywhere are slowly beginning staff reductions in each of these AI-first departments. Where before you’d need 600 customer support representatives responding to individual customer requests, AI customer agents take the place of humans and automate the response rates. The latter requiring Python to modify the code. It feels very much like 2013 when I tried taking a taxi to Anacostia neighborhood in Washington, D.C. after Patriot Boot Camp and couldn’t so I took an Uber.The experience was new, eye opening, and now in some urban areas autonomous driving cars are becoming standard.

The old way of doing things are slowly being replaced by something more shiny and despite the shinyness, it’s important as leaders to slow it down, strategize, plan and be intentional in our travels with those on our teams that have gotten us this far and spend some time thinking about the future and what’s important.

David Molina is an entrepreneur, strategist, and thinker–doer dedicated to exploring the full spectrum of human performance. Born to Mexican immigrant parents, he forged his path from farm fields to Captain in the U.S. Army, commissioner, and eventually to founding companies, nonprofits, and creative ventures. He shares more about health systems, business workflows, and intentional work on Instagram at @davidcmolina.