Companion to "Replace or accelerate."
Write the ten tasks you would repeat most in year one. Be blunt and boring about it. Mark each one R or A: R = the machine could replace it, the result arrives without you; A = the machine only accelerates it, a human still holds it. The question is never "does AI affect this business"; it is which pile grows faster, and whether pile-one growth touches the deliverable or only the overhead.
| R: machine replaces | A: machine accelerates |
|---|---|
| The result the customer wanted arrives without you: a passable article in ninety seconds, a basic logo, a voiceover, a product description, a first-draft contract, a menu translation. The tell: a beginner with free tools can hand over something the customer will accept. Not excellent. Acceptable | The task finishes faster or cheaper but a human holds it: scheduling replaced the phone tag around the cleaning, routing shaved the drive between lawns; quote calculators, invoice automation, photo organization, transcript search. When software eats these, your margin goes up |
| Task | R / A | Customer sees it? |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverable row: the task that produces what the customer pays for (the clean, the article, the edit, the signed loan) | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Second customer-visible task, if there is one (the walkthrough, the revision, the report) | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Finding customers, channel by channel | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Quoting and pricing the work | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Scheduling and routing | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Invoicing and getting paid | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Production work, top three activities by hours | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Production work (continued) | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Customer communication between jobs; record keeping, taxes, compliance | ☐ Yes ☐ No | |
| Whatever else you would actually spend Tuesdays doing | ☐ Yes ☐ No |
The most common self-deception in this exercise is marking a core deliverable as A because you do it better than the machine. The question is not whether you are better. You probably are. The question is whether the customer can tell, and pays for the difference. A violinist is better than a Spotify playlist, and almost nobody hires a violinist for dinner-party background music.
| Where do the R marks cluster: admin rows or production rows? | |
| Any production task you argued was "basically just" assembling information? (That is how pile one talks) | |
| Money task (what the customer actually pays for): pile 1 or pile 2, beginner version? | ☐ Pile 1 (exposure climbing) ☐ Pile 2 (machine on your side) |
| Share of year-one hours on R tasks (feeds question 5 of the scorecard: over half +2, quarter to half +1, under a quarter hold) | % |