What a difference a day makes
”One day at a time is all we do. One day at a time is good for you.” John Lennon
Previously at the Volcano Base I was examining the pros and cons of top-down and bottom-up approaches to applying AI and automation in organisations.
That sounds pretty dry. Pfffff. If only there was a tool of some kind that could make the text more interesting. Ah well.
Mission Briefing
What a difference a day makes
It’s been a very technical, hands-on time since the last time I wrote (building systems for clients and the Volcano Base). I’ve also been getting better connected with organisations in my local area. And some lovely people introduced me to other lovely people to talk about lovely AI and automation. Sort of a “lovely cubed” thing.
The interest in what I’m doing is steady, rather than explosive. Which is a bloody good thing, given it’s just me, a selection of “synths” and some trusted associates. There’s real interest in application, rather than simply possibility.
A different service model
Cashflow has been difficult, sadly. It's almost a truism to say that the larger the business you're helping, the slower they pay. It can make things more tense than they need to be.
One thing is working quite well, though, as a “different sort of service model”. Traditionally, I’d spend a fair amount of unpaid time trying to get to the point where I could offer a proposal. Even with AI assisting with parts of that process, it’s still flawed. That’s mainly because the technology is developing so quickly. A proposal submitted on Monday could be irrelevant a couple of weeks later.
Additionally, with applied AI and automation, you can’t really know what the environment is going to be like until you start doing something practical with a company’s actual systems, making it almost impossible to do a “realistic” estimate. So I tested a different offer with a new prospect:
That’s it. Not exactly fancy. It’s working well for me for a number of reasons:
Knowledge
If you’ve worked in strategy or consulting, you’ll already know how much it’s possible to learn about a company in a single day. It’s a lot: who’s who, how things get done, what stops things getting done, what systems are in place, what are the obvious challenges, where’s that smell coming from, and so on.
In one day, while working on automating or enhancing a simple business process, I learn a lot about the company without any meetings or presentations or interviews being necessary. Just get stuck in.
By the end of that day, the business has a much better level of knowledge about what’s possible too, and how AI and automation could practically help them. Everything is suddenly a lot less theoretical.
All of that helps to put me in a position where I can make meaningful recommendations for a next step, based on their specific situation. Or, we can call it quits and move on, no harm done.
Trust
You need to trust someone if you’re going to let them work on your systems. Having a low-risk day with a tangible output helps to develop that trust.
Cashflow
Volcano Base is a new business, so cashflow is critically important. A steady drip is much healthier than the feast-or-famine scenario most professional service businesses experience. A single, low-risk day, with something practical at the end of it, is much easier to get signed off, which helps cashflow.
There are probably loads of reasons why this approach is a Really Bad Idea. But that’s one of the things you get to do when you run your own thing. It’s working for me and for new clients, so I’ll keep offering it as a way to get started, unless it doesn’t seem appropriate.
I know a whole bunch of consultants and self-employed people read this (you weirdos), so do you do anything similar? Or is this a really risky approach? You can actually comment now, which was one of my techie things this week. Give it a try. (Scroll down a bit... there you go... little bit more...)
Classified Intel
Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.
Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol
Rao Surapaneni
I've wittered on about AI agents autonomously engaging with each other for a while. Mainly in the context of a hypothetical personal agent on your device that goes off to conduct tasks by "speaking" to a business' agent. If fact, I've been talking about this sort of thing for 10 years now. Such a bore. Anyway, A2A gets us much closer to that being a reality.
Wordpress AI Builder
Neel Shivdasani
Wordpress now has an AI builder. I used it this morning to create a website for a local community group. It took 10 minutes to create a fully functional Wordpress site, with structure and content drawn from the description I wrote. Not perfect, and certainly not best practice (whatever that is these days), but perfectly acceptable.
Soul In The Machine
A nice presentation from Zoe Scaman discussing the Programmable Organisation. Very nicely designed, as usual. It raises some good questions about the role of humans in highly automated organisations. It's not a doomer perspective at all. It strikes a nice balance between being inspiring and pragmatic. I like that zone.
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