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Artificial Intelligence and Your Time: What Small Business Should Know
Why artificial intelligence plans for someone else — and how to fix it. A practical consultant's view.
I am launching this site as a working blog and a place where I will write about business, time, mistakes, decisions, automation, documents, websites, consulting and artificial intelligence.
This is not a site of a large consulting company. And I do not want to look like someone who has answers to every question.
I write as a person from real life.
I have experience in sales, production, management, working with clients, spreadsheets, commercial offers, people, processes, mistakes and decisions. I have opened businesses, lost, started again, spent time, nerves and money.
Now I am building a new direction: consulting for people and small business.
I help make sense of ideas, processes, websites, documents, spreadsheets, automation, implementing artificial intelligence, first steps and risks.
My goal is simple: help a person not spend time, money or energy in the wrong place.
And the first topic I want to start with is time.
Why an AI plan does not account for your real time
Artificial intelligence answers fast.
It gives a plan. It encourages. It writes: “this can be done”, “here are the steps”, “this will take about an hour”.
At first it feels like the perfect assistant appeared next to you.
But there is one problem.
Artificial intelligence does not live in your time.
It can talk about time. It can write: “this will take 30 minutes” or “this can be done in 2 hours”. But for it, those 30 minutes are not real minutes of human life.
For artificial intelligence, an action is a description.
For a person, an action is time, attention, hands, fatigue, searching for the right button, doubts, checking, returning to context and responsibility for the result.
The same action can cost very different amounts for different people:
- one person posts two ads in 30 minutes;
- another spends two hours;
- a third gets stuck on registration, choosing a category, translation, payment, checking the text and loses half a day.
And if artificial intelligence does not know that, it gives a plan not for you.
It gives a plan for a hypothetical person who remembers everything, reads fast, does not get tired, does not get lost in new services, is not afraid to press buttons and has no other tasks.
But a real person is not like that.
A real person lives in limited time.
I am not against artificial intelligence
I am not writing this as someone who is against artificial intelligence.
On the contrary.
I actively implement artificial intelligence in my own life, work, site, content, processes and consulting. I check where it helps, where it speeds things up, where it saves time, and where it starts creating chaos.
That is why I see the risk.
Artificial intelligence can very confidently recommend what looks right on paper but in real life takes a day and does not move a person toward the goal.
A person thinks: “it understood me”.
But the system often simply answered the phrase it saw.
It does not know your pace. It does not know where you get stuck. It does not know what is easy or hard for you. It does not know that reading a long text also takes time. It does not know that every switch between topics costs focus.
If you do not explain this, artificial intelligence starts planning for an imaginary person.
Not for you.
This is close to the topic of attention and context switching. When a person constantly moves between tasks, tools and explanations, they lose not only minutes but focus. For small business this is especially visible: the owner often holds sales, clients, documents, the site and decisions alone.
A person lives in time; artificial intelligence works with descriptions
Here the real difficulty of translation between a person and a machine begins.
A person asks about an action in real life.
Artificial intelligence answers in the language of text, assumptions and general scenarios.
A person lives in time.
Artificial intelligence works with descriptions.
Between them you need a translation.
When artificial intelligence writes “this is fast”, you should ask: fast for whom?
For someone with experience or without?
For a specialist or for a small business owner?
For someone who already has all materials, or for someone who still has to find everything?
For a calm day or for a day with ten other tasks already?
For someone who reads interfaces quickly, or for someone who needs to check everything three times?
Without that, the answer can sound smart and logical but detached from life.
Sometimes it is just annoying.
Sometimes it costs money.
Sometimes it can affect important decisions.
What to do in practice — How to synchronize time with AI →
Read also: Routine in business eats time, One hour with AI saved me €1000 a year.
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On the home page — how we review repeated manual work. Not sure what to automate?