How do I make sure it’s actually useful and it’s helping me and that it actually gets completed and maintained?
Fourth option is a fractional partnership, fractional AI team at your company. And this is how we built Workflow Autopilot.
Downsides first
What’s the downside? Let’s start with downsides first. It’s going to be more expensive.
And that’s just how it is when you have a team that’s working with you every day, every week to make your systems, your AI, and make sure it’s maintained, reviewing all your stuff. It requires a lot more manpower. It’s just going to be more expensive.
A team that cares about your outcome
But the benefit is that you have a team and they’re working with you and they actually care about your outcome because if you’re not winning, they’re not winning. Since they’re working with you every day, they’re going to really care about your outcome.
So what’s included in this would be you have someone actually watching the outputs of your AI daily.
The first month and a half
You want to make sure that the people that you’re partnering with have the time to maintain your applications and they’re dedicating at least a month or a month and a half to the actual development of your AI workflows and your automations.
Because even though the product will be built and it’ll be highly customized and integrated into your business, it’ll still need a lot of dedicated focus in those first month, month and a half to make sure it’s doing everything you want it to do, make sure it’s working.
Since AI is so new, there’s a lot of things that need babying and need like a human to review.
Is it making you money?
Most importantly, is it making you money? Is it actually helping? Is it improving your economics? Is it making your company more profitable? And if it’s not, things need to change.
The engineering side
So what you want to look for is companies that have that engineering background and they have that ability to make your automations and make your AI solid, security-proof, not selling your data to another country, and it’s actually maintainable. That’s on one side.
The business side
On the other side, you want the business operations side. So you want to make sure that they’re tracking the metrics that are important to you.
This is a churn rate. This is conversion rate. How many of the clients that use this automation are churning versus not churning. And so these are the business aspects you want to keep an eye on.
Why you need both
I see a lot of companies out there that are really good at one thing or really good at another thing. You have whole companies of MBAs, which they’re really good at the business side of things, but the technology side fails.
And it ends up costing you, the client, a lot of money in AI tokens or in switching teams or trying to fix it yourself and breaking things.
There’s no software on this planet that can survive after being created in a month. It needs maintenance. It needs adjustments.