3 AI subscriptions, same old problems

You're paying for three AI subscriptions, and you've probably got the same problems you had before you bought any of them.

I've worked on over 200 digital plans with business owners, and nearly every one started as a shopping list. These days the list is AI tools: a chatbot, a meeting note-taker, an agent somebody mentioned at a conference.

Every item makes sense on its own. None of them says what you're trying to fix.

So I ask one question about each item on the list: what problem is this solving? Most owners can't answer straight away.

Say your customers message you, and a third of them wait more than a day for a reply. The obvious buy is a chatbot on the website. But if those messages land on your own phone while you're with another customer, a chatbot won't change a thing. The real problem is that nobody owns the replies.

Once the problem has a name, the fix is usually smaller and cheaper than the tool you were about to buy. Often it's one person who owns the inbox, with set times in the day to clear it.

You don't have to do the questioning yourself. Paste your list into Claude or ChatGPT and say: "For each tool, ask me what problem it solves and what that problem costs me each week."

Any tool you can't answer for comes off the list.

Name the problem first, and you might find you only needed one of those three subscriptions, or none of them.