One of the first business books I read was The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. The premise is simple: a woman starts a bakery because she is great at baking pies. Business grows. She bakes more pies. It does not scale. The fix was not more equipment or more people. It was PROCESS.
That book is over 30 years old. Most businesses still have not learned it.
People. Process. Tools. In That Order. Always.
Every business runs on three things: people, process, and tools. The order matters. Most businesses default to tools first because tools are visible, purchasable, and easy to defend in a budget meeting. (No one ever got promoted for improving a process nobody can see.)
Process is harder. It requires discipline, documentation, and the willingness to admit that how things are done today is not how they should be done tomorrow.
Now replace “tools” with “AI” and you have the exact mistake most businesses are making right now. They are handing AI to individuals and saying go bake more pies.
You Did Not Solve the Bottleneck. You Multiplied It.
The sales rep who produced one proposal a week now writes five. Sounds like a win. It is not.
Downstream, someone has to read those five proposals. QA them. Process them. Route them. If that team was already behind, AI did not solve the problem, it amplified it. You did not remove the bottleneck. You put five times the pressure on it.
Most companies are AI-enabling their PEOPLE. Very few are AI-enabling their PROCESS.
When you AI-enable people, every individual gets faster. But the system does not. Gaps between teams widen. Handoff points break. The bottleneck that was manageable at one times the volume becomes unmanageable at five. We see this in nearly every new client assessment: tool adoption is high, operational improvement is not.
Map It Before You Automate It
The fix is the same as it was when Gerber wrote about it in 1986.
Map the process. Identify the bottlenecks. Document who does what and how. If you cannot describe the workflow manually, you are not ready to automate it. AI applied to a broken process does not fix the process, it accelerates the failure.
Once the process works, automate it. Not before.
Do not give your pie baker a faster oven.
