Yesterday I posted here asking why AI tools feel exciting at first, but somehow never become part of how businesses actually work day to day.
The thread ended up getting way more replies than I expected. I spent some time reading through the comments and something interesting kept coming up.
a lot of people said the same thing in slightly different ways. Most AI tools live in a separate tab. People open them when they want help writing something or brainstorming, but they never really become part of the actual workflow. After a few weeks people just go back to doing things the way they always did.
Another thing I kept seeing is that ai works better when it replaces something annoying rather than adding a new step. Things like drafting emails, summarizing meetings, triaging support tickets, writing the first reply to a lead. stuff that happens all the time and already feels a bit tedious.
Reliability also came up a lot. It's easy to use AI for ideas or drafts, but when something touches revenue, clients, or operations people get cautious pretty quickly.
one comment in the thread stuck with me. Someone said AI needs to remove a step, not just change how a step is done. that line actually explained a lot of the examples people shared.
Reading through all this made me curious about something else. If you had to pick one repetitive task in your business that you'd actually want AI to handle, what would it be? not a big platform or anything complicated. just one annoying workflow that eats time every week.
I asked founders why AI rarely sticks in real workflows. The replies were interesting.
byu/Jaded_Argument9065 inEntrepreneur
Posted by Jaded_Argument9065
3 Comments
People really need to understand and think hard about what needs to be automated away and what doesn’t.
Hey everyone,
I’m a developer starting a personal challenge: **solve 100 real business problems in 100 days using technology and automation.**
Many businesses struggle with things like:
* repetitive manual tasks
* inefficient workflows
* managing customer inquiries
* collecting or organizing data
* outdated or missing websites
Sometimes these problems can be solved with **simple automation, small tools, or custom software**, but they often go unnoticed.
So I want to ask:
**What is one challenge or repetitive problem you face in your business that you wish technology could solve?**
If it’s something that **can be solved with software, automation, or a small web tool**, I’ll try to build a solution for it as part of this challenge.
No promises I can solve everything, but I’d love to explore real problems and see what can be built.
Drop your problem below 👇
The biggest reason AI does not stick is that people try to bolt it onto existing workflows instead of redesigning the workflow around what AI is actually good at. If you start with the output you need and work backwards, you usually end up with something that actually saves time instead of just adding a new step to the process.