I've often said, "People don't call me when things are going well." After more than 28 years of working with businesses, I've found that statement to be pretty accurate. Most business owners don't wake up one morning and decide they need help with operations. They call when things start falling apart. Maybe the company has stopped growing, employees aren't communicating, customers are complaining, or the owner is working 70 hours a week trying to keep everything moving. Operations has traditionally been something businesses deal with when they have a problem, rather than something they invest in to prevent problems. I've always found that a little ironic because most of those problems could have been avoided with better operations in the first place.
Think about how most businesses get started. Someone has an idea for a product or service, figures out how to sell it, brings in some customers, and starts generating revenue. That's usually the exciting part. Operations, on the other hand, isn't nearly as exciting. Who wants to spend time documenting processes, establishing responsibilities, creating performance measurements, or figuring out how information moves through the business when there are customers to find and money to make? So, businesses tend to make things up as they go along. They hire people, add software, create spreadsheets, and develop their own ways of getting things done. Eventually, those individual solutions become a collection of disconnected processes that nobody fully understands. As long as the business is making money, everyone assumes things are working. Until they're not.
One of the biggest indicators that a business needs operational help is when growth begins to stall. I've worked with companies that reach a certain revenue level and just can't seem to get past it. Others manage to break through to the next level, enjoy a period of growth, and then slowly fall right back to where they started. It's almost like the business has a ceiling that it can't break through, or at least can't stay above for very long. In many cases, the problem isn't a lack of customers or opportunities. The business simply doesn't have the people, processes, or systems in place to support the next level of growth. They can generate more business, but they can't consistently deliver on it. Eventually, something gives, and the company settles back into what it can comfortably manage. Getting to the next level is one thing. Building a business that can stay there is something entirely different.
There are plenty of other warning signs. Maybe the owner has become the bottleneck for every decision, and nothing gets done without their involvement. Maybe the company keeps hiring people, but nobody seems to have less work. Projects regularly miss deadlines, employees are constantly putting out fires, or everyone seems busy but very little actually gets accomplished. Sometimes revenue is increasing, but profitability isn't. Or the company has invested in several software systems that don't communicate with each other, forcing employees to enter the same information multiple times. Another common problem is when the business becomes overly dependent on a few key employees who seem to know how everything works. If one of those employees leaves, suddenly nobody knows how to perform certain tasks. These aren't necessarily sales or marketing problems. They're usually signs that the business has outgrown the way it's being managed.
I believe AI is about to completely change the importance of operations. We're already seeing businesses use AI to write emails, create marketing content, analyze information, and answer customer questions. But those are really just individual tasks. The bigger opportunity is when AI starts working across the business, handling multiple steps in a process, communicating with different systems, and completing work that previously required several people. Imagine a new customer signing an agreement and AI automatically setting up their account, creating a project, assigning tasks, scheduling follow-ups, preparing invoices, and keeping everyone informed along the way. Much of that is already technically possible. But it’s not magic and won’t reliably create something useful about your business with information it doesn’t have. AI needs to know how your business is supposed to work. If you haven't established the processes, responsibilities, rules, and expectations, what exactly are you asking AI to follow?
This is where I think a lot of businesses are going to run into trouble. There's a tremendous amount of excitement around AI, and understandably so. Business owners are hearing that they can automate entire departments, reduce expenses, and accomplish more with fewer people. But buying an AI tool doesn't magically fix a poorly run business. If your customer onboarding process is a mess, automating it may simply allow you to make the same mistakes faster. If nobody knows who's responsible for approving an invoice, AI isn't going to automatically know who should make that decision. And if your business doesn't have reliable information or measurable goals, how will you know whether AI is actually improving anything? Before you can automate a process, you need to understand it. And before you can improve a process, you need to know what it's supposed to accomplish. That's operations.
Here's where I'm going to make a prediction that might surprise some people. I believe the COO, Integrator, or whoever is responsible for operations could become one of the most influential people in an AI-driven business, potentially even more influential than traditional sales, marketing, or technology leadership. That's not to say those other roles won't be important. They absolutely will. But think about it. AI is making it easier to generate marketing content, identify prospects, manage sales activity, develop software, and analyze data. The technology itself is becoming more accessible to everyone. What will become increasingly valuable is the ability to connect all those capabilities into a business that actually works. Someone still needs to determine what the business is trying to accomplish, how the different departments work together, what processes should be automated, and how success is measured. That's traditionally the responsibility of operations. And as AI takes on more of the actual work, the person responsible for designing and managing how that work gets done becomes incredibly important.
What's particularly interesting to me is how this could change the way new businesses are built. Historically, companies started with sales and marketing, added employees as revenue grew, and eventually brought in someone to manage operations when things became too complicated. I think that model is going to be turned upside down. New businesses will increasingly need to think about their operational structure from day one. What are our goals? How does work move from one person or system to another? What decisions can AI make, and which ones require human approval? What should we measure, and who's responsible when something goes wrong? You may not need a full-time COO when you start a business, but you absolutely need someone thinking about these questions. In fact, I would argue that businesses that ignore operations from the beginning are going to have a much harder time competing with those that build their companies around efficient processes and AI from the start.
I also think this changes what we should expect from someone in an operations role. Traditionally, a lot of operational work involved managing people, coordinating meetings, tracking projects, and making sure things got done. Those responsibilities aren't going away, but AI will increasingly be able to handle much of the administrative work associated with them. The value of an experienced COO or Integrator will shift more toward understanding the business, identifying opportunities for improvement, designing better processes, and deciding where people and AI should work together. In some ways, I think the role becomes less about managing the daily activities of the business and more about designing how the business operates in the first place. That's a pretty significant change, and one that I believe will create tremendous opportunities for people who understand both business operations and technology.
For most of my career, operations has been viewed as the function that fixes things, organizes people, and keeps the business running. I think we're entering a period where operations becomes the foundation for how businesses are designed, built, and grown. AI isn't going to eliminate the need for good operations. If anything, it's going to make operations more important than ever. The businesses that succeed won't necessarily be the ones with the most AI tools or the biggest technology budgets. They'll be the ones that understand how their business works, have clearly defined goals and processes, and know where AI can make a meaningful difference. And maybe the biggest change for someone like me is that, instead of getting a call when everything is going wrong, I'll start getting calls from business owners who want to make sure they get things right from the beginning. Because in an AI-driven business, operations isn't something you add when you grow. It's something you need in order to grow.