What operating taught me
Good automation starts with understanding the work.
I started my first business in ninth grade, converting VHS tapes to DVDs so I could buy the first iPhone. I did not know it then, but the work was teaching me a lesson I would keep relearning: a business is a collection of promises, processes, and decisions, and the owner usually carries too much of it in their head.
Across the businesses that followed, the pattern became hard to miss. Knowledge lived in inboxes, spreadsheets, shared drives, and the memories of a few key people. Every handoff cost time. Every repeated question pulled an operator back into work they had already solved.
When ChatGPT arrived, I did what operators do: I tested it against real work. Thousands of hours of experiments made one thing clear. AI is only as useful as the context and process around it. Automating a broken workflow just makes the wrong thing happen faster.
That is the principle behind how we teach and build today. Audit the work. Optimize the process. Automate only what deserves to run. The goal is not more software. It is returning time to the people responsible for the business.
Corey Ganim

