Aug 10, 2026 · 16 min · 10 segments
Have you thought about the cost of using AI in your business? Most founders think it’s going to be a great cost saver for them. Build the automation, set it up once and replace a wage … but I’ve…
I've seen founders with three or four half-finished automations sitting in three or four different platforms.
No one's connected any of it, none of it's reliable and every switch costs them the time that they've already sunk into the latest AI tool.
Then there's the time cost that actually like it never shows up on the spreadsheet, right? Learning the tool, troubleshooting when it breaks, checking whether it's actually done the task correctly because half of the time you don't fully trust it yet.
There's hours of the week that used to go towards sales combos, product decisions, direction, strategy.
The founder hasn't removed themselves from the work at least when they were doing the tasks.
When tools like Claude started doing research, writing emails and building automations, I genuinely wondered what this meant for our executive assistants and virtual assistants.
If AI can complete so many of the tasks an EA traditionally handled, do businesses still need them? And look, I'm going to be really honest with you.
And if you're a founder or business owner who's been messing around with these AI tools for the last year, especially the last six months, you've probably asked yourself the exact same question.
A year ago, if you wanted an email drafted, a document summarized, a meeting scheduled or like processes written up, you needed a person to do it all.
Now you can just open up a chat window and have the first draft in like 10 seconds and AI can research a topic faster than a human.
It can write your tone of voice once it's been trained on enough of your content.
And it can hold these entire systems in its tiny little AI head without ever forgetting a step.
So if you're a founder or a business owner and you're looking at your monthly spend and you see executive assistant as a line item, And you see a $15 or $20 a month AI subscription that seems to do half of what the person does, it's a completely reasonable thing to think.
Like, why am I paying this salary when this tool can do a lot of it? And honestly, some of the tools have really earned that question being asked.
I've watched AI draft a client proposal in the time that it takes me to make my coffee.
I've seen it pull together competitive research docs that would have taken a person on my team half a day.
It doesn't need a sick day and it doesn't need to be trained the same way that a new hire does.
So when a founder looks at that and thinks, I could just do that myself with AI and skip the hire a year or two ago, that would have sounded ridiculous.
I actually think it's a smart question to ask because here's what I've realized.
After watching this play out with client after client and on sales calls, we've been asking the wrong question.
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I've seen founders with three or four half-finished automations sitting in three or four different platforms.
No one's connected any of it, none of it's reliable and every switch costs them the time that they've already sunk into the latest AI tool.
Then there's the time cost that actually like it never shows up on the spreadsheet, right? Learning the tool, troubleshooting when it breaks, checking whether it's actually done the task correctly because half of the time you don't fully trust it yet.
There's hours of the week that used to go towards sales combos, product decisions, direction, strategy.
The founder hasn't removed themselves from the work at least when they were doing the tasks.
When tools like Claude started doing research, writing emails and building automations, I genuinely wondered what this meant for our executive assistants and virtual assistants.
If AI can complete so many of the tasks an EA traditionally handled, do businesses still need them? And look, I'm going to be really honest with you.
And if you're a founder or business owner who's been messing around with these AI tools for the last year, especially the last six months, you've probably asked yourself the exact same question.
A year ago, if you wanted an email drafted, a document summarized, a meeting scheduled or like processes written up, you needed a person to do it all.
Now you can just open up a chat window and have the first draft in like 10 seconds and AI can research a topic faster than a human.
It can write your tone of voice once it's been trained on enough of your content.
And it can hold these entire systems in its tiny little AI head without ever forgetting a step.
So if you're a founder or a business owner and you're looking at your monthly spend and you see executive assistant as a line item, And you see a $15 or $20 a month AI subscription that seems to do half of what the person does, it's a completely reasonable thing to think.
Like, why am I paying this salary when this tool can do a lot of it? And honestly, some of the tools have really earned that question being asked.
I've watched AI draft a client proposal in the time that it takes me to make my coffee.
I've seen it pull together competitive research docs that would have taken a person on my team half a day.
It doesn't need a sick day and it doesn't need to be trained the same way that a new hire does.
So when a founder looks at that and thinks, I could just do that myself with AI and skip the hire a year or two ago, that would have sounded ridiculous.
I actually think it's a smart question to ask because here's what I've realized.
After watching this play out with client after client and on sales calls, we've been asking the wrong question.
