Are You Ready to Put AI to Work in Your Business?

What does your business do?

• Sell products online (e-commerce, DTC, retail)
• Sell expertise (consulting, professional services, coaching)
• Manage money or assets (finance, wealth management, insurance)
• Serve donors, members, or a cause (nonprofit, foundation, advocacy)
• Feed people or host them (restaurant, hospitality, events)
• Build, fix, or install things (construction, trades, contractor)
• None of these quite fit

How many people are on your team — and be honest, contractors count.

• Just me (or me and a cofounder)
• 2–10 people
• 11–50 people
• 51+ people

If I walked into your office and asked your team "where does our customer data live?" — what would actually happen?

• Long pause. Someone would say "I think Sarah has a spreadsheet."
• Three different people would point to three different systems.
• They'd open the CRM — but it'd be missing half the story.
• They'd pull it up, and it would mostly be right.

Can you tell me, right now, how many new customers you got last month — and where they came from?

• Honestly? No. I'd have to dig.
• I could get the number, but "where they came from" would be a guess.
• I know roughly, but it takes 30 minutes and a few tabs to piece together.
• Yes, and I can tell you which ones came from which channel.

When someone new reaches out — a potential customer, a referral, an inquiry — what actually happens next?

• Someone notices eventually and follows up when they get to it.
• There's a process, but it depends on who's working that day.
• We have a system — it's not perfect, but it moves.
• Automatic: they get tagged, routed, and touched within hours.

How do you decide which customers hear from you — and which ones don't?

• Everyone gets the same thing. We don't really sort people.
• We split by a couple of basics — like "customer" vs "hasn't bought yet."
• We group people by what they've done or bought, but we're not great at acting on it.
• We sort by behavior, value, and where they are with us — and we act on it.

How much of your weekly reporting happens without a human touching it?

• None. Someone makes a spreadsheet every week. It takes hours.
• A few dashboards update automatically, but nobody looks at them.
• Most of our key numbers are automated, but someone still has to make sense of it.
• Reports build themselves and flag what needs attention. I just read.

When something goes wrong — late shipment, missed appointment, dropped ball — how does your team find out?

• Usually when the customer complains.
• Someone notices during a manual check.
• We have alerts for some things, but not everything.
• Automated alerts catch it before the customer knows.

Do the tools you run your business on actually talk to each other?

• Not really. Someone copy-pastes between them.
• A couple are connected, but it's held together with duct tape and hope.
• Most are integrated, but there are still manual gaps.
• They're connected with clean data flowing between them.

If a customer contacted you today and asked "what's my complete history with you?" — how long before your team could answer?

• We'd have to check 3-4 different places and still miss stuff.
• We'd get most of it, but it would take a while.
• Someone could pull it up in a few minutes.
• One screen. Everything's there.

Right now, your team's use of AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever — is:

• I genuinely don't know what they're pasting into those things.
• A few people use them on their own. No rules.
• We've talked about it but don't have formal guidelines yet.
• We have approved tools, clear policies, and people know the boundaries.

Last one. What's the one thing that, if you could hand it to a machine tomorrow, would give you back the most time this week?