Feels like AI changed the default speed of business overnight. A founder said recently AI completely changed how they handle churn. Instead of manually reading angry cancellation emails, they dump thousands of support tickets and refund requests into AI and ask it to surface hidden patterns humans missed. Apparently they discovered a huge percentage of churn came from one tiny onboarding confusion nobody internally noticed because support staff normalized it over time. That was pretty cool.
So entrepreneurs, what’s the biggest "before vs after AI" difference in your company?
What’s the biggest "before vs after AI" difference in your company?
byu/dewharmony03 inEntrepreneur
Posted by dewharmony03
10 Comments
Honestly the biggest shift is that “we should look into this” became “dump the messy notes in and see patterns in 10 min.” Support tickets, sales calls, churn reasons, whatever. Still need someone skeptical in the loop though, AI can make a bad assumption look weirdly confident.
Client communication. Before: every follow-up, onboarding message, and check-in written from scratch, 15-20 minutes each. After: a set of prompt templates for each situation, same quality output in under 3 minutes. It sounds small but when you’re sending 10-15 of those a week it adds up to hours. The bigger shift is that communication actually happens now instead of being postponed because the blank page felt like too much friction.
With AI lot of technical part of analytical part of business became time efficient now companies can draw conclusions, make changes in strategy in no time
My hard-work is no more valued and asked ‘is this ai’. I am a dev btw.
After: much more efficiency during daily tasks, creating time to focus on other things that matter and (still need a human eye and touch.
The AI has obviously hugely evolved, but a human still needs to be available if for example a support bot cannot fix the issue. I must say, I am immensely impressed by the capabilities of the bots nowadays, especially those from the major US based AI companies.
For us, the biggest difference is speed of execution.
Before AI, turning an idea into a course, product outline, lesson plan, ad, FAQ, script, or support doc took way longer and involved a lot more back-and-forth.
Now we can go from rough idea to structured draft much faster, then clean it up with human judgment.
Codex has been useful on the product side too, especially for testing ideas, improving code, catching issues, and helping us move faster while building.
It doesn’t replace the actual business thinking, but it removes a lot of the blank-page friction.
Investing in AI early on quite a bit has immensely helped us outcompete our competitors in my opinion. Two cases stand out for us and for some context we are a b2b business doing about ~$5M ARR.
The first is we have not had to hire more engineers in our team. We had initially estimated we would have to hire a few more engineers to keep up with the growth but AI tools like Windsurf and Cursor running on Claude models like Opus 4.6 has basically made all our existing engineers like near 10x productive. Most claim they haven’t written a single like of code manually in the last 3 months. They have basically turned into product managers and code reviewers, letting them move much much faster.
The second is customer discovery. We noticed early on people were shifting to tools like ChatGPT and Gemini for getting answers and no longer using traditional Google search as much. So we invested simple processes early on to ensure we were showing up or getting cited. Over time, especially since the beginning of this year, a good % of our customers now find us via ChatGpt, Grok etc. Funny part is we have literally just setup AI tools that have been trained on our company data and products to look at Google search data to come up with questions our customers are searching for and then literally auto publishing a well researched blog on our website daily answering these questions verbatim!
Looking forward to hear others!
AI is def helpful but it also makes the customer lose trust after they get to know they’re bumping their head with AI instead giving a set code of responses instead of a real human providing an actual resolution
I used to test features faster than my developer could build them. He was the bottleneck.
Now? He’s two sprints ahead of me at all times. I can’t test fast enough and am interviewing for QA help. We’re two years ahead of schedule on our roadmap and I’m now the bottleneck.
Saving a lot of time on grunt work like drawing actionable insights from client and internal meetings. We have a company-wide memory bank now that anyone can prompt for feedback/insights/instructions… e.g. “what did so-and-so say about this.” So much miscomms and mistakes being mitigated now.