I'm a Driver, Not a Mechanic

I sat in my truck for longer than I want to admit, trying to figure out how to even start talking about AI. Not because I didn't have anything to say. Because everybody already has an opinion about it, and most of those opinions are either "this changes everything" or "this is a fad," and neither one is actually useful if you're just trying to run a business.

So here's where I landed, sitting in that truck.

I love this truck. It's fun to drive. I could not draw you a diagram of how the engine works if you paid me. I don't know what half the sensors do. And none of that matters, because I don't need to understand the engine to get where I'm going. I push the gas, it goes. I push the brake, it stops. I turn the wheel, it turns. That's the whole relationship I need with it.

That's exactly how I think you should treat AI, and it's the opposite of how most people approach it. They open ChatGPT, see a blank box that looks suspiciously like a search bar, type something in like they're Googling a recipe, and walk away thinking, "oh, it's a smarter search engine." Fine, I guess. Not exactly life-changing.

Here's the thing though. You already know what you want. You're not sitting there wondering what to do with your business. You know exactly what you want: more customers, more time, fewer phone calls after dinner. What you don't have is the fifteen minutes it takes to draft the email, or the hour it takes to figure out the tool, or the mental energy left over after an actual day of actual work. That's the gap AI closes. Not "what should I do." "Who's going to help me do the thing I already know I need to do, faster."

Think about the plumber who's the only one in town who answers the phone at 10pm. Good for business. Terrible for sleep, for the kids who wake up when the phone rings, for the version of you who started this whole thing because you wanted a plumbing business, not a phone-answering business. You didn't get into this to sit behind a desk. Painters didn't pick up a brush dreaming about email threads. Florists didn't fall in love with flowers so they could spend an hour a day on hold with a supplier.

That's the actual pitch, if you can even call it that. Not "AI will make you a better plumber." It won't. It can't replace the part of you that actually does the job: the taste, the judgment, the "does this feel right" that only a person has. What it can do is take the parts of the job you never wanted in the first place, the emails, the scheduling, the fifteen-minutes-of-typing tasks, and hand them back to you as time instead.

I tried it myself before I said any of this out loud. Pulled up an email I'd been avoiding, told the AI to draft a response in my voice, friendly, no corporate nonsense, pasted in the original message, hit enter. It wasn't perfect. It didn't need to be. It was close enough that I fixed two words and sent it. Fifteen minutes down to two.

That's it. That's the whole revelation. Not magic, not a robot replacing your job, just fifteen minutes back that you didn't have yesterday.