Businesses Don’t Need to Leap Ten Steps Into AI. They Need the Next Two or Three.

I’ve become convinced that businesses don’t want to leap ten steps into AI. They want the next two or three steps.

They want low-risk and low-barrier adoption using the communication tools they already use to run their business today: email, text messages, and phone calls.

That’s what changed my thinking.

Start with a problem that already exists

The original idea behind one of our AI Employees was solving a real problem with literally every business I work with and talk to: following up with the customers who have been quoted.

Executives always wish these people received more attention. That problem absolutely exists at mass.

But the normal response is to reach too far too fast. A company hears what AI might be able to do and starts imagining a giant internal platform or a complicated agent system before the team has experienced one useful win.

That is a huge leap for a team that may still think of AI as a chatbot.

The better next step is easier to understand: email the quoted leads to a specialist. That specialist texts them until they are warm, working inside the company’s approved rules. When someone is ready, the opportunity goes back to the team.

That is not ten steps. It is the next two or three.

Use the front door people already know

Businesses do not need another login before they can get value from AI.

If a person on the team already knows how to send an email, forward a message, answer a text, or make a phone call, they already know how to communicate with an AI Employee.

That matters because the hardest part of adopting a new technology usually isn’t the capability. It is changing how people work.

Historically, websites, the internet, and smartphones all took years to fully penetrate the market. Adoption wasn’t limited by the technology. It was limited by leadership, organizational change, and generational turnover.

AI will be no different.

The right first AI project is not the most impressive thing the technology can do. It is the smallest useful responsibility your business can hand off safely today.

Add one understandable responsibility

Start with a job that is repetitive, important, and already falling through the cracks.

Missed calls. Quote follow-up. Gathering updates from subcontractors. Building and maintaining a website. Moving information between systems. These are simple, understandable responsibilities.

Give the job clear boundaries. Keep a human in the loop. Let the business experience AI helping outside of a chat window.

Then take the next two or three steps.

That is how businesses become comfortable enough to let AI help with bigger and bigger pieces of the company—not through one giant leap, but by making the next useful move obvious.