Brett Schklar: AI Is Not Taking Your Job. It Is Taking Your Tasks.

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Brett Schklar has asked more than 1,800 CEOs how AI adoption is actually going inside their businesses. The honest answer, most of the time, is badly. He wrote a book about it called AI Without the BS: The CEO’s Playbook for Actually Getting AI Right, founded AI First Leadership, and now spends a lot of his week in three hour workshops with rooms full of CEOs who mostly want to talk about what went wrong.

He is also running a business the way he tells other people to. His fractional CMO firm, Grow, has 30-plus contract CMOs serving about 50 companies with zero employees, built AI-first from the start in 2020.

I got him on Unscripted Small Business for about half an hour, and he handed over the framework he teaches in those workshops. Here is what came out of it.

Verify It, Or Do Not Publish It

The first question I asked was the biggest mistake, and the answer was not about tools.

“If you’re not verifying and reviewing the things that you’re putting out there that’s developed by AI, it’s very likely that you are maybe not in the world of AI slop, but you are creating misinformation about yourself.”

— Brett Schklar

The risk is not that the writing is bad. The risk is that it is wrong about your own company, published under your own name, and now it is the record.

My friend Michael McDougald at Right Thing SEO makes the same case from the search side: the giveaway is structural, and AI slop leaves a fingerprint a humanizer pass cannot scrub.

Save Customer Service For Last

The coolest AI implementation Brett has seen is a company that got its customer service dialed in. It is also the last place he tells anyone to start.

The reason both are true is that customer service is where he has watched it done worst. Get it right and it means you institutionalized your company’s actual knowledge first, then turned that into the customer experience. The company that pulled it off moved its satisfaction scores up significantly.

I told him about the SaaS company I watched gut its support team, then discover the tickets were being answered fast and wrong, then pay double salary to hire back the one person who knew how everything worked. Support is retention. Do not experiment there first.

Matt Brooks of SEOteric puts it another way: treat ChatGPT and Claude as external customer service reps who are currently untrained. They cannot log in, so they are scrabbling for any scrap of signal about what you actually do. Vague marketing copy starves them.

Every Workshop Starts With The Grievances

Brett spends the first 30 to 45 minutes of each CEO session listening to horror stories. He calls it the airing of the grievances, Festivus style, and he says it happens every single time.

“People have taken shortcuts, or we as AI implementers or AI advocates have oversold the benefit without the guardrails.”

— Brett Schklar

Guardrails is an exhausting word at this point. It is also the one thing standing between an owner and a story they will be telling in somebody’s workshop next year.

Intelligence Is Basically Free Now. Judgment Is Not.

This is the core of what Brett teaches, and it is worth slowing down for.

Anyone with a generative AI tool has access to effectively unlimited intelligence. So IQ stops being the thing that separates businesses. What is left is EQ, the emotional maturity to use it around people, and AIQ, which is Brett’s term for combining the two and turning that unlimited intelligence into something the business can actually use.

His picture of intelligence without judgment is Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover. Excellent at counting cards. No common sense at all.

Tasks, Not Jobs

“Is AI really taking our jobs? My short answer is no. But AI is taking tasks.”

— Brett Schklar

The catch is what happens if managing tasks is the entire job. Brett says AI exposes great leaders and exposes really crappy ones, because it separates people who think in transformations from people who run a queue.

I brought up my wife, who works at a tattoo shop. A machine cannot tattoo anyone, but 20 to 30% of what she would have done as an apprentice three years ago is handled for her now. Brett’s read: that frees her to spend the time on creativity and on choosing which clients and designs she wants, instead of re-cutting videos and drawing another set of Roman numerals.

Easy, Hard, Impossible

Brett credits Micha Kaufman, the CEO of Fiverr, with the clearest description of what changed. Generative AI arguably threatens a large part of Fiverr’s business, since anyone can now make their own logo, landing page or site. Kaufman named it anyway.

“Easy tasks are getting automated, hard tasks become easy, and impossible tasks become possible.”

— Micha Kaufman, quoted by Brett Schklar

Be Curious Before You Try To Be Creative

I asked what happens to the people who are not natural self-starters, the ones who want clear boundaries and then do great work inside them. Brett compared it to software developers, who had a forty year run where a good salary was the floor and curiosity set the ceiling. Everybody with an AI tool is now standing at the start of that same run.

“Before you can have creativity, you have to be curious and you have to bring curiosity. And so my call to action to every one of those workers that are the task managers, they’re afraid that their jobs are gonna go away, is this: learn how to be curious.”

— Brett Schklar

From 40 Hours To 2: The RFP Rebuild

The most concrete win Brett shared is one a lot of small businesses can copy directly.

One caveat before you automate the proposal: make sure somebody is answering the door. The lead response research from Ignitvio covers 1,824 small businesses, and 68% of them never respond to a lead within 24 hours. Automating how you chase new work does nothing if the work already knocking goes ignored.

Plenty of small companies chase work through requests for proposal. A retail company needs its parking lot repaved, so it sends an RFP to 10 or 20 paving contractors, and every one of those contractors has to answer each item and argue why they are the best choice. It is brutal, repetitive work.

“A process to respond to an RFP, which might have taken 30 to 40 hours in the past, only takes about two hours, of which an hour and a half is just reviewing what AI wrote.”

— Brett Schklar

The companies he rebuilt this for stopped dreading RFPs and started asking for more of them. And note the split: AI researches and drafts, a human reads it before it goes out.

He is candid about the flip side. He still cannot automate his own outbound sales without it feeling automated, and he will not ship anything with a hint of AI slop attached to it.

Why 95% Of Pilots Fail, And The Moneyball Fix

MIT found that about 95% of AI pilots fail. Brett’s explanation is that small businesses were sold the big swing, walked up to the plate, and swung for the fences.

His alternative comes from the movie Moneyball. The Oakland A’s stopped chasing home runs and optimized for one thing: getting every batter on base. It rewired how baseball is played.

For an owner whose biggest problem is time, 68% is not a marginal improvement. It is a different company.

Keep AI Strategy Away From The IT Department

I suggested this works best as a democratization of intelligence: give each person one small headache and let them try to solve it themselves, rather than appointing a central group to distribute AI from on high.

“Don’t ever give AI strategy to the IT department if you’ve got an IT department. That’s a formula for failure.”

— Brett Schklar

There is no way to centralize the gains, he said. The owner’s job is to give people confidence to try things, set the guardrails, and create a place to share what is working and what is not as close to real time as possible.

Brett’s Closing Thought

“In a world where intelligence is unlimited and where everyone has access to intelligence and it’s no longer a competitive advantage, how can you bring judgment and wisdom to that unlimited intelligence, to help bring people together and find value in what people do day in and day out in your company?”

— Brett Schklar

Connect With Brett Schklar

brettschklar.com · AI First Leadership · the book, AI Without the BS · his Substack, Think BIGGER with AI · his LinkedIn newsletter, Think BIGGER with AI · LinkedIn · YouTube

🎧 Listen: Unscripted Small Business on Castos · 📺 Watch: on YouTube