Issue #46: The End of Operations
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This past week, I released my new e-book entitled AI and the SaaS Mirage in Market Research: What Founders Should Build and Investors Should Back (get it here!). While the title speaks explicitly to business models, it reflects my belief that, even as the insights/data industry adopts AI across all functions, there is still a role to play for humans in the conduct of market research.

But not all humans.

Or maybe I should say not all types of roles that are inhabited by humans today.

If you look across any white-collar profession, you will see two things:

1. Much of people's time is spent (either deliberately or despairingly) on operational tasks that today's machines should be able to do.
2. The share of one's time on operational tasks follows a decreasing arc over time: the more senior you are, the less operational work you do.

By way of example, there is no doubt in my mind that an agentic AI-enabled platform could (and should) eliminate 99% of all human touches to post-setup consumer fieldwork. All that would be left for humans to handle would be the trickiest of field scenarios.

What’s more interesting, however, is that, in most disciplines, the route to both strategic prowess and senior management tends to start in low value manual work. This is true for every function in a business.

So what happens then when that operational work goes away? Because it’s going to.

I think it’s three things.

People who used to learn through doing will, in the future:

1. Learn through setting up products. By learning how people use their products and understanding the functions the products perform, people will develop valuable expertise.
2. Learn through advising clients on the use of products. In much the same that traditional agencies built expertise, AI-enabled agencies will give junior staff exposure to business decision-making and to senior staff who have greater experience both supply-side and client-side. If we think more broadly in this vein, we can see that it works for all revenue and partnership functions.
3. Learn through internal mentoring on the use of products. It’s like #2 above, only with internal teams. So this would cover legal and finance functions.

The only function I haven’t spoken about above is HR. That is a different case though. While there is operational work in HR, much of what is automatable (payroll, benefits, general HR ops) has largely been done. HR’s challenge is different, and by the looks of it most HR functions are not up to the challenge. But that is a topic for a different time.

So, goodbye operations as we know it. Goodbye to learning through data entry, spreadsheet manipulation, time-consuming desk research, email-based quotations, fieldwork monitoring, PowerPoint creation, invoicing and receivables chasing.

Goodbye pay-your-dues, low-person-on-the-totem-pole servitude. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the *** on the way out.

Hello human value.

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