What counts as a business function?
Anything whose job is to make the business money or keep it able to: sales, marketing, finance, customer acquisition, customer success and legal
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Functions, people and operations: the three things every business runs on
Every business runs on three things: the functions that make money, the people who carry them out, and the operations that connect the two. Get those right before you add AI
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The five operational mistakes, what each one costs and where to start
The short answer
Functions, people and operations
Every business runs on three things. Functions are the parts that make money, like sales, marketing and finance. People carry those functions out. Operations is the glue between them: the meetings, handoffs, training and documents. Only when all three work together does AI become a lever instead of a patch.
What is business operations, exactly?
The connection between your people and your functions. It is the meetings, the communication, the training and the handoffs that let people actually carry the functions out
When should a business start using AI?
After you can map all three. Then you can see which work repeats often enough to automate, and AI cuts operating costs instead of speeding up a mess
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1. Functions make the money
Functions are the parts of a business whose whole purpose is to bring in money or protect it: sales, marketing, finance, customer acquisition, customer success, legal. If you drew your business as a machine, these are the parts that produce something a customer pays for.
2. People carry the functions out
People are everyone responsible for running those functions: your directors, managers, employees, individual contributors and contractors. A function with nobody who owns it is a function that does not happen.
3. Operations connects the two
This is the part most owners cannot name. Operations is how people actually carry the functions out: the meetings, the messages, the training, and the documents passed from one person to the next. It is the glue.
When operations is weak, good people and good functions still fail, because the work falls into the gaps between them. A handoff nobody owns. A decision that lives in one person's head. A process document that has been out of date for a year. Our post on the five operational mistakes covers the gaps we find most often.
Where does AI fit?
Map the three first. Once you can see who does what, and how work moves from one person to the next, you can see which steps repeat often enough to be worth automating. That is where AI saves real money: it cuts the operating cost of work you already understand, and your margins go up.
Put AI in before that, and you automate work nobody has defined. It runs faster, and it is still a mess. If you want the same idea told as a kitchen, read business operations 101.
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Get the teardown, with the first fix for each
The five operational mistakes, what each one costs and where to start
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