Practical AI adoption
The Friction Tax
Hoping everything goes smoothly isn't a cure.
I have been playing trombone since 6th grade.
That means I've spent a surprising amount of my life thinking about something most people never notice.
The slide.
Trombone players obsess over the slide. A trombone with a poorly maintained slide can still make sound. It can still play notes. It can technically do the job.
But every movement requires a little more effort.
A sticky, scraping slide forces you to think about mechanics instead of music. Fast passages become difficult. Precision suffers. Confidence suffers. You start compensating for the instrument instead of expressing yourself through it.
And over time, all that friction gets in the way of making music.
Therein lies the rub (excuse the pun) for solopreneurs and SMBs trying to use AI to their advantage.
Too much friction.
The Friction Tax
Most AI projects fail for the same reason many software projects fail.
Not because the technology doesn't work.
Because using it requires too much effort.
Imagine me telling you;
- Open ChatGPT
- Copy information from your CRM
- Paste it into a prompt
- Review the output
- Copy it into Word
- Edit it
- Save it
- Upload it somewhere else
That process may only take five minutes.
It practically guarantees that you will never use it again. Especially if you have to perform this same process more than once a day.
The Reality of Human Behavior
People naturally choose the path that requires the least effort.
If the old process takes ten minutes and the new AI-powered process takes six minutes but feels complicated, many people will stick with the old process.
The improvement must be obvious.
The value must be immediate.
The friction must be minimal.
Original Goals
I never set out to save you ten hours a week.
People make ridiculous promises like that all the time.
I wanted to give you thirty minutes.
Thirty extra minutes to spend with a customer.
Thirty extra minutes to work on your business instead of in it.
Thirty extra minutes to leave the office a little earlier.
Thirty minutes doesn't sound like much until somebody gives it back to you every week.
Have We Applied Enough Grease?
The funny thing about friction is that we rarely notice it while we're creating it.
We add one more spreadsheet.
One more approval.
One more copy-and-paste step.
One more place to look for information.
Each addition seems harmless.
Then one day we wonder why everything feels harder than it should.
Decades later, I'm still thinking about the same thing.
The audience never notices a great trombone slide.
They notice the music.
Your customers never notice a well-designed workflow.
They notice the experience.
AI doesn't need to change your business overnight.
It only needs to remove enough friction that you can spend more time doing the work you care about and less time fighting the process.
That's the real goal.
Not more technology.
Better music.