Think about how you use a GPS. You don’t open it and admire the features. You type in where you’re stuck and where you need to be, and it finds the route. You start from the destination, not the device.
Most people do the opposite with AI. They hear about a shiny new tool, buy it, and then go looking for a problem it might solve. That’s backwards, and it’s why so many AI subscriptions quietly go unused (opens in a new tab).
Start from the pain instead.
A small example
A small insurance office was losing about 20 hours a week to one grinding task: manually typing claims information from forms and emails into their system. It was nobody’s favorite job and it never ended. They didn’t start with a tool. They started with that specific pain. Two weeks later they had a setup that handled the bulk of it, saving around 15 hours a week. Same business, same people, one very annoying problem, gone.
How to do it
- Name your worst recurring headache. The task everyone dreads and nobody owns.
- Describe it in plain words. What comes in, what you do to it, what comes out.
- Only then ask which tool fits (opens in a new tab). The problem chooses the tool, never the reverse.
The flashiest AI product on the market is worthless to you if it doesn’t touch a real pain. The plainest one is priceless if it removes an hour you hate, every day.
Tomorrow: do you actually need to hire an AI expert? (Short answer: probably not yet.)