So James Pates, who was my seventh guest, is the founder of Solve Studio, an AI and automation consultancy helping businesses use new technology without losing the human side of how they work.

I think focus on fostering good relationships with your colleagues, your customer and your suppliers.

Be consistent in communicating publicly what you're working on.

Don't be afraid to ask for help.

I think more often than not, people are genuinely happy to help.

So finding someone who's been through it before to ask and talk to can be a lifesaver.

Ultimately, the pace of technology is unlikely to let up anytime soon, but human centric skills are more important than ever and the need for them isn't going anywhere.

Do you tend to see kind of key themes of problems that they're trying to solve or is it completely random?

I wouldn't say it's random often often the businesses I speak to the founders I speak to already know the problem so they come to me with the project but the other the alternative way of doing it and this is this is what I find so often I start working with a business who are doing pretty well and they're you know they're trying to do as much as possible with a small amount of resource and budget as they can they're looking at hiring people they're drowning in admin That admin is where we focus.

We'll look at kind of the two or three high frequency routine tasks that they're finding themselves doing either daily or weekly.

And this is what we focus on.

So I call these copy and paste jobs or tasks.

And often it's something like transferring data manually from one place to another you know they are finding themselves copying and pasting something from an email and putting it into a spreadsheet or copying and pasting something from a spreadsheet and putting it into an invoice and more often than that that can be done with an off-the-shelf integration or a custom script or piece of code I find that replacing these kind of tasks as automation can give back a decent amount of time to the team or to the founder to focus on growth.

But crucially, and I find this myself, it also removes kind of the menial manual stuff that can take up headspace.

If a founder or team knows that they need to get smarter with systems, but they just don't know where to start, what would you suggest that they look at first?