By Leigh Ann Hubbard

If AI can save your staff so much time … maybe you don’t need so many staff members(?).

Jordache Johnson often talks about this with execs he works with. He helps businesses strategically incorporate AI. Foresight’s Steve Moran chatted with him at this year’s SMASH — a conference focused on marketing and sales in senior living.

Jordache actually believes laying people off would be short-sighted. Instead, he advises, think differently about how you want those staff members to use their time.

For a more in-depth answer, scroll down, or watch the full interview below. In it, Jordache also shares:

  • How to get started in AI — and figure out how you want to use it
  • Whether it helps if you’re polite to ChatGPT
  • How long it takes to write a good prompt
  • How Jordache helps organizations incorporate AI

Transcript Excerpt

What to Do When AI Saves Your Employees Tons of Time

Transcript has been lightly edited for readability and clarity.

JORDACHE: Once we start unlocking efficiencies in our teams and in our organizations, we don’t have to fill that efficiency with other work. Maybe we don’t have to work as hard, but we’re getting better results.

The worst mistake you can do is start letting people go, because now, the work of what five people were doing, we can do with a team of three because we have AI integrated into everything. It’s so shortsighted.

I have the conversation with CFOs a lot, because it’s like, yes, this can save you money, but we are way too early in this game to be sitting here trying to cut costs right now. We should be using that time either for culture building or — what else can we do with that time?

STEVE: That’s the way I see it. You use AI to make people more efficient so that those people can do other things. You should see it as a revenue generating source, not a cost reducing source.

JORDACHE: 100%. And it allows your people to start thinking on a higher level on these more critical thinking things, whether it’s in sales, where I can spend more time getting to know the person — I was giving the example earlier: If I’m on a sales call, I don’t have to worry about taking notes. I can just literally listen, have a conversation, be engaged in a conversation, because I know it’s all getting transcribed in the back end. That allows me to not think about what am I writing down — “Oh, I missed that.” “Oh, I’m trying to remember what they just said.” Now I’m not listening to the conversation.

Or if I’m doing all these tasks of pulling analytic reports down and dropping them in the CSV and trying to analyze them, that may take a couple hours a week of my time. What can I be doing with those couple hours a week instead? How can I go expand the business?

Remember Google back in the day? They had 20% of the time to work on moonshot projects — whatever the person want to work on, as a side project. How can I unlock my team to start thinking innovatively to how can we improve our organization?

STEVE: Yeah, think about it. If you could just give every team member, from maybe even line staff all the way to the executive director, an hour, two hours a week to go out and just to think, “What is it that we could do that could transform — that would make us better?” rather than trying to cut that cost out, which — let’s suppose you’re taking the cost cutting approach. All it does is leave your business the same place you were before you started AI. And you save pennies.

JORDACHE: And you may increase your output a little bit, and you’re saving pennies, but what’s going to happen in six months, 12 months down the line when you don’t have those people there? Now you’re going to have to either rehire them to grow and scale, or you’re going to work those three people there even harder, because now they’re going to have to manage more systems.

Editor’s note: This January, at the Foresight AI Lab in Las Vegas, learn how to use AI to elevate your organization. You’ll walk away with skills and takeaways you can immediately put to use. Learn more here.