The Question I Didn't Ask on a Discovery Call

I want to share a real story from a discovery call I had recently with one of my clients.

We spent most of it talking about what AI could do for her business. The possibilities, the workflows, where the time savings might come from. Standard territory for a call like this. And at one point I asked the question I always ask: where do you spend most of your time nowadays?

She said, well, I do a lot of content. SEO, social, blogs, all of it.

That’s the moment the whole call turned on. I just didn’t know it yet.

The Fork in the Conversation

Here’s where these calls usually go. The client names the thing that eats their week, and the consultant says: great, here’s the system that automates all of it. That’s the expected move. It’s what I’m there to do, in theory. Content, SEO, social — all of it is squarely in the range of what AI can take off someone’s plate today.

My next question could have been exactly that. Alright, here’s how we automate it.

But instead, I asked something different. I asked: do you enjoy that part of the work?

And she said, yeah. That’s the part I enjoy the most.

If I’d been running the playbook, I would have just handed her a machine to do the one thing she loves. She’d have nodded along, signed off, and quietly felt worse about her job six months later without quite knowing why.

Automate the Drudgery, Not the Joy

So we kept going, in the opposite direction.

Instead of automating what she loved, we dug into what she didn’t. What’s the work she doesn’t enjoy? The stuff that’s technically part of the job but that she never has enough time for in a normal day, the tasks that sit at the bottom of the list and generate a low hum of guilt?

That’s the part you actually want AI to help with.

This is the reframe I keep coming back to. You don’t necessarily want AI to automate every single aspect of your work. You want to free up more time for the work you truly enjoy. That’s the real value of any AI system, and it’s almost the exact inverse of how most people approach it.

Because AI can do almost every part of marketing now, the assumption is that it should. But capability isn’t a mandate. Just because a tool can take a task doesn’t mean handing it over makes your work, or your day, any better.

Keep doing the stuff you enjoy for as long as you can. Point the automation at everything else.

The Point Was Never Efficiency

There’s a quiet assumption baked into most AI conversations: that the goal is efficiency. Do more, faster, with less. And efficiency is real, it matters, I build for it every day.

But it was never the whole point.

The goal isn’t just efficiency and productivity. The goal is the fulfilment you get from the work you do. If you automate your way to a calendar full of time and none of the work that made you like your job in the first place, you haven’t won anything. You’ve just optimized the meaning out of your week.

The best AI strategy protects the work that gives you energy and clears out the work that drains it. That’s a very different exercise than “automate everything you can.”

How to Run This on Your Own Work

You don’t need a discovery call to do this. You can do it this week.

Make two lists. On one side, the parts of your job you’d protect even if a machine could do them tomorrow. On the other, the parts you’d hand off tonight without a second thought. Most people have never actually separated the two. They just have a vague sense of being busy.

Then point your AI effort at the second list first, and be honest about the first. The tasks you dread, the admin, the formatting, the reporting nobody thanks you for. Start there. Leave the work you love alone, at least until keeping it stops making sense.

And notice which list is growing over time. If the work you enjoy is quietly shrinking while your “efficiency” climbs, that’s not a win. That’s a warning.

The client left that call with a plan that gave her more time for the exact work she got into the field to do. That’s the version of AI enablement I actually care about.

The goal was never to do everything faster. It’s to spend more of your time on the work that’s worth doing.

That’s what matters most of all.