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Think Younger Employees Are Better at Tech? Not Where It Counts

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​It’s easy to make some technology assumptions about people at different, shall we say, “experience levels.” It’s probably true that some of your more seasoned team members don’t have the smoothest relationship with technology. Truth be told, they’d rather avoid using computers altogether wherever possible. Others grew up online. They didn’t know a world before Google and hardly remember life before social media or smartphones. But here’s the thing: assuming younger employees are better with technology can lead you down a bad path. Yes, they may be more adept at smartphones and socials. They may more easily interact with AI, or be less cautious about using it. They may even be able to help those veteran team members solve common tech issues without much effort. But being fluent in social media or even vibe coding doesn’t automatically make someone a cybersecurity expert. Tech Experience and Cybersecurity Awareness Are Different Things A team member with strong everyday tech skills may ...
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Time, Money, and the AI Speed Illusion

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When small business leaders talk about AI, productivity is the most common focus. Time is money, after all — so if an AI tool can save time that’s worth more money than what you’re paying for the tool, that’s a win. This is why free or baked-in AI tools seem so promising: for nothing extra over what you’re already paying for your office suite, Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot promise to save you significant time. And it’s absolutely true: AI can do certain tasks in seconds that would take your team way longer. But it isn’t automatically true that AI is saving you the kind of time it appears to. This is the AI speed illusion, and it’s something every small business leader or team lead needs to consider. The Promise: Less Time on Slow, Repetitive Work The promise of these AI tools is an attractive one: team members who aren’t staring at their screens, agonizing over how to word an email, are team members who can do other things. The same goes for slogging through meeting notes or recor...
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​Microsoft Excel Is Getting Smarter

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​Does your business do much spreadsheet work? If so, you’ll want to know about changes that are beginning to roll out to Microsoft Excel users. Some longstanding challenges with using the app (especially in team environments) may soon be a thing of the past. Here’s what to know. The Problem: Excel Is (Was) Old, Boring, and Inconsistent Most workers have at a minimum dabbled in Excel as a way to track certain types of business data. You might have some power users on your team too, and others anywhere in between. And all of them run into some of the same problems. Keyboard shortcuts they use all the time in other apps just magically don’t work in Excel. There are a half a dozen different ways to do certain things. And why, for the love of everything good in this world, can’t Excel make up its mind on how to present dates and currency? Seriously: it just isn’t right that you can type “11/1/2026” into four different cells and get four different representations. The decades-old spreadsheet...
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Don’t Let AI Eat Your Business’s Personality

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AI with Personality Have you noticed the internet getting a little… well, generic lately? We certainly have. Everything has the same kind of sheen and luster to it — even the mechanic down the street suddenly has sharply polished prose flowing throughout his website. But everything is also just…kind of the same. The verbiage, pace, flow. Heck, even visual design is all kind of starting to homogenize into this nondescript (but grammatically perfect) goo. You probably have a decent guess why this is happening. It’s AI. We’ve already shot way past the “should businesses use AI?” question. Spoiler alert: they are. We’ve also spent time on this blog talking about the AI productivity trap, where AI isn’t quite saving us the time we think it is. But this problem is something different. Today’s businesses need to be careful that AI doesn’t eat their personality. AI Tends Toward Generic Correctness As AI seeps into more and more corners of businesses’ outputs (emails, marketing content, meeting...
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“AI Confidence” Could Be a Trap

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AI promises to do a lot for lots of different types of businesses. This starts with the kinds of LLM tools we’re all pretty familiar with by now, the ones that can generate reports and create drafts of documents and emails. And for some businesses and users, AI agents are showing even greater promise. These are instances of AI that can take sequences of actions on your behalf, not just answer your questions or analyze spreadsheets. But no matter how you are or aren’t using AI today, there’s a trap that businesses need to watch out for: overconfidence in AI. Some thinkers are calling this the AI confidence trap, and it’s worth thinking through. What Is the AI Confidence Trap? The AI confidence trap is essentially the belief that AI is delivering value where it isn’t, or that it’s delivering more value than it really is. This is common, and you’ve probably already experienced it on a micro level. Here are a few ways the AI confidence trap shows up. Close, But Not Quite Have you ever ask...
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Do You Know What Your Team Is Using AI For?

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Your team is almost certainly already using AI. Do you know who’s using it, and which tools they’re using? Some small businesses are already all-in on AI, using it wherever they can. But many small business leaders are on the skeptical side, or at least haven’t seen a reason to roll out AI on a wide scale. Some might even say “we aren’t using AI yet at our company.” But if you have a team working in an office context, that probably isn’t true. People are using AI. Someone’s using Copilot to draft emails; another’s uploading company spreadsheets to ChatGPT to get help. Someone else may be running an obscure browser extension or AI-powered browser to get ahead on some aspect of their work. So even though the business hasn’t formally adopted AI anywhere in particular, AI is all over their workflows. Maybe only in small bits and pieces, but it’s there. An Overlooked Question: Where Are the Boundaries? If what we just described sounds more or less accurate for how your business is operating...
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“Human Middleware” Isn’t the Way

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​AI tools are supposed to make work easier, removing menial and time-intensive tasks your team members don’t want to do. But for many businesses, expectations haven’t quite lived up to reality. Instead of eliminating this kind of work, AI simply changes it up. It’s called human middleware, and it isn’t the way forward. What is Human Middleware? Human middleware describes any business workflow where the humans in the loop have to intervene between AI systems or steps. Humans operate in the middle, hence middleware. In these situations, humans end up shuffling information from system to system or doing other similar menial tasks…so that the AI can then do its job (which was, again, to eliminate menial tasks). The Problem with Human Middleware The problem here is that if AI isn’t improving work, saving time, or otherwise benefiting your company in ways that offset the costs, then it isn’t worth those costs. This is especially concerning if the “new” work is worse, more convoluted, or othe...
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