What is Lean AI: Why Fixing Your Process Beats Buying Another Tool

Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. I am your host dr. Mike Donaldson and today on the show We're going to talk about the massive disconnect between the AI revolution you see in the headlines and the reality of running a small business We're gonna deep dive into why most AI advice is usually setting you up for failure the reason why Automating everything is a recipe versus disaster. We've all heard it Lean AI can cut through the noise.

It can reclaim your time and finally make technology work for you instead of the other way around. Ever felt like you're falling behind because you weren't using a thousand different robots or bots? Have you tried AI and felt like it's just added more work to your plate? If that's the case, this episode is going to provide the clarity you're looking for.

Okay, before we get into it, please take a moment and hit that subscribe button. I invite you to put some comments out there and questions. All right, let's get into it. So we've heard it everywhere.

It's in your LinkedIn feed, your email. It's in the reels as you're scrolling through on Instagram. For small business owners and entrepreneurs, it's exhausting. When you're running a small team or maybe you're a solo entrepreneur, you don't have a chief AI officer.

All these ads about AI, it's just bogging you down. You don't have a $10 million budget for R &D. You have a business to run, customers to serve, and a bottom line to protect. Most of the advice out there sound like it's written for Silicon Valley startups with endless venture capital, which a lot of us solo business owners and small businesses we don't have.

So here's the truth. For small business, you don't need more tools. Most of us are already suffering from tool fatigue with everything that we have. We have subscriptions for things we don't use on and dashboards we've never looked at.

What small businesses really need is clarity. They need to know what actually matters. You need to know how to separate the neat from the necessary, that shiny from what really you need to help with your business. This is where lean AI can help.

All right, to understand lean eye, we need to look at two different worlds and how they shake hands and interact. First one is lean thinking. And the second one, of course, is artificial intelligence. For lean thinking, This is decades old.

It's been around a long time. It's proven. Most famously, it came with the Toyota production system. It's a philosophy of efficiency, okay?

Lean asks the hard questions. As where is the waste in our day? What is slowing us down? What are we doing right now that adds absolutely zero value to the customer?

That's key. If it doesn't benefit the customer, why are you doing it? In the lean world, it's called Muta. It's a Japanese term for waste.

So one example is if you're moving a box from one side of the warehouse to another for no reason, that's a waste. If a customer has to fill out the same form three times, that's a waste. So lean focuses on what the waste is. Now, artificial intelligence.

AI is the great accelerator. AI asks, what can we automate? What can we assist with? What complex decisions can we support with data?

Instead of starting with a tool, we start with your operations. We don't ask, how can I use CHEP GPT? We rephrase it and we ask, why is our onboarding process taking six hours when it should take 30 minutes? Once we find the bottleneck, we look to see if AI is the right wrench for that specific bolt.

Not everything's gonna fit. AI can't solve everything, so you have to be specific on what it is you're looking for and identify those gaps. That's where you can have some pitfalls. Lean A is not about chasing the latest trend.

Just because a new image generator, a new voice bot came out this morning, doesn't mean it belongs in your business. It doesn't solve a specific problem identified by your lean analysis. It's just a distraction, okay? Lean AI is not about automating broken processes.

If you automate a broken process, it's a huge mistake. If your customer service workflow is a mess, if it's confusing, slow, and frustrating for the customer, if you put an AI chat bot on top of it, all you've done is made a hot mess even faster. You're now annoying your customers at the speed of light. Think about that.

If it's a mess, now it's a bigger mess right in their face. You have to fix the process first. Fix the process. AI is the amplifier.

It amplifies efficiency, but it also amplifies chaos, so you've got to fix the messes first. Also, Lean AI is not about using AI just because the guy down the street is. Competition is great, all right? We all have to compete.

But don't let AI envy drive your budget. We want to use AI because it adds value to your unique workflow, not just because it makes for a cool headline that you have AI. Now, so what does it look like in the morning when you're sitting down and getting ready for your day? First, it's about identifying the waste.

Start by looking for repetitive manual work that drains your soul, all that busy work. Are you manually copying data from an email into a spreadsheet? Are you copying data from a spreadsheet to make slide decks to present? Are you writing the same thank you for reaching out email 40 times a week?

Are you spending hours trying to summarize meeting notes? This is where you start. Second, you've got to improve the process first. You've got to fix the process and make it lean.

Before you touch a piece of software, and I mean this, you don't even want to look at the software. See, where can you cut out a step? Can we simplify the language? If we can make the process better with just a pen and paper, we do that first, okay?

We want AI to inherit a clean, logical workflow. We don't want a mess. Like, I'll keep saying that. Third, applying AI is where it saves real Time.

Now is the time you bring in the tech. You've got your processes in order. It's digitized. That's important, too, because AI can only see things that are digitized.

If things are on paper, got to get them off paper. They've got to be online. Now you bring in the tech. We look for high ROI wins, that return on investment.

That's what you got to hit first, that low -hanging fruit that you can grab and save time immediately. It might mean using AI. as a tool to draft of those 40 emails so you only have to hit send once you finish the last task and of course review. I've said that before I always say that you got to have that human point of contact in there on emails.

All right it might mean the AI tool that listens to your meetings and automatically populates your project management software whatever you're using. If you have the project management software this can tie in and capture all of those actions. on that AI tool with it, listen to your meetings. Google has that on their apps as well.

Most meeting software, especially Zoom and all these others, you can record the meetings, strip that out, and now you can create actions from that. The key point is to implement AI where it buys back your life, gets time back for other things you can focus on that human element. So the last thing you need to do is you got to measure the results, not the excitement that you just implemented something. This is the lean part of the equation.

We don't care if the tool is cool. We care if it worked. Did it save the five hours he thought it was gonna save this week? Did it reduce errors?

Did it make the customer happier? If it doesn't make the customer happier, if the answer is no, you gotta be clear, you gotta cut it. In Lean A, we're not afraid to turn a tool off if it isn't earning its keep. If you spent the time building up the tool and it doesn't work, dump it.

Move on. Sometimes if you start diving in to keep trying to do a fix and a fix and a tweak and a tweak, if it's still not adding value, it doesn't matter. You got to let it go. Sometimes the best AI solution, it's small.

Maybe it's just one simple automation that has your schedule. And that's OK. It's something. You don't need a robot army.

You need a smooth operation. Okay, let me say that again. You don't need a bunch of robots and a bunch of AI things happening. You just need a smooth operation.

Get those few things in place that are going to help you and help your operation be smooth. Now, why is the future for small business so good? I'm an optimist. I truly believe that AI is the great equalizer in the history of business.

For the first time, A small business owner with a team of three or one can have the analytical power and the creative output of a Fortune 500 company. Think about that. There's a lot of power there at our hands now. But to get there, we have to be thoughtful.

Small businesses and as a small business owner, we don't have the luxury of burning cash. We've got budgets. We don't can't burn on all these tech and equipment that don't pan out. So every dollar.

and every hour counts. Lean AI will help you focus on the return on investment, that ROI. It helps you avoid the unnecessary tools and most importantly, it uses AI as a support system, not a disruption. When you approach AI through a lean lens, it stops being scary.

It stops being this big looming thing that might replace you. It's not going to replace the humans. It's going to take care of the work, that mundane, drudgery work that we do. AI can become very helpful.

It's a very efficient system that handles that current work, like I said. The whole reason you started the business in the first place, you wanted to create, serve, and to grow. It's about being practical. It's about being sustainable.

And it's about making sure that as we move forward in this high -tech future, we don't lose that human element that makes a small business so special. Our small businesses are the backbone of the economy, and we've got to keep them running strong and smooth and keep that human element. We use the AI to handle the data so we as humans can handle the relationships So the rule is empowering. Okay, if AI success is worth was worth 90 % math if it was Most of us would be in trouble.

A lot of soupy in trouble, but that's not the case. All right, that's all I've got today So, please take a moment rate the show. Thank you for listening as always. I'm dr.

Mike Thank you for listening and have an excellent day