Hire The Machine First

The next person you hire is going to spend most of their week doing work a machine already does for free. And you are going to pay for that, with taxes and onboarding and a raise every year, for as long as they stay.

In March 2023, Goldman Sachs economists Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani published a report on generative AI and economic growth. The headline number was 300 million full-time jobs worldwide exposed to automation, and that is the number everybody quoted. The line underneath it is the one that should have scared people. Roughly two thirds of jobs in the US and Europe carry some exposure, and up to a quarter of all current work could be done entirely by a machine.

Read that again. A quarter of the work. Not a quarter of the workers.

Now go get the legal pad. You know the one. The list you made the last time you decided you were finally going to get some help. Look at what is actually written on it. Intake. Scheduling. Chasing people who owe you an answer. Formatting the proposal. The research. The weekly report nobody opens. In 28 years I have never once watched somebody write that list and put the money-making work on it. Every line on that page is sitting inside Goldman's quarter.

So here is what you are about to do. You are going to take the cheapest category of work in the modern economy and put a salary behind it. And the day that salary starts, something else starts too. You get careful. There is a person at home counting on that check, so you stop making the call that would actually change the business, right at the moment the business needs you to make it. I have watched good owners go quiet for three years after their first hire and call it stability.

You know why we do it anyway? Because a person feels like a real business and your other Brain feels like a shortcut. Nobody stands at a barbecue and says they scaled by hiring software. That is vanity, and it is expensive.

Your other Brain is awake while you sleep. It is smarter than you in most rooms. It costs less than your phone bill and it will do the intake, the chasing, the formatting and the first draft of anything you point it at, tonight, without an interview. What it will never do is tell you which client is about to walk, which conversation is one honest sentence from closing, or which number is quietly bleeding out. That call is yours. It was always the only part that was yours.

Hire the machine first. Not because people do not matter. Because until the machine has taken everything it can take, you have no idea what a person should actually do for you. Hire a human into the leftovers and you have just paid a salary to protect your own bottleneck.

Tomorrow morning at 8, before email, do this one thing. Take last week, the real one, and write down every task that ate more than twenty minutes. One page, by hand. Then go down that page and put a checkmark next to every line your other Brain could have produced a passable first draft of. Passable, not perfect. That column of checkmarks is your first hire, and it starts before lunch.

The list is going to be longer than you want it to be. You already knew that, which is why you have not made it. You have been protecting that work because it is the work you are good at, and being good at it is who you think you are.

That is not a business. That is a job you gave yourself, with worse hours.

If you would rather stop reading about execution and go do it next to people doing the same, that is what we built Ultradia.io for.

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